1. Joseph Skipsey:

A Brief Biography
by Basil Bunting.

A man's circumstances seldom matter to those who enjoy what he makes.  We buy our shirts without asking who the seamstress was, and should read our poems without paying too much attention to the names they are printed over.  Things once made stand free of their makers, the more anonymous the better.  However, there are exceptions.

The poems JOSEPH SKIPSEY made stand in a territory of their own, fenced off on one side from the nameless elaborators of ballad and folksong and on the other from literary poets who have taken what advantage they could of ballad and folksong conventions.  Burns had a language and a whole literature of forerunners, an album of tunes to find words for and an output of very sophisticated satire to underpin his songs; but Northumbrian is only a spoken language, with no recognisable spelling, as Swinburne found, and no literature of its own within the last four centuries, except anonymous ballads.  The Scottish small-holder had an education, however brief: the Northumbrian pitman had none.  On the other hand, the process of balladry had ended, at least in the pit villages, before Skipsey's time.  He had to speak with his own mouth even when he meant to speak for all his people.

Thus the facts of Skipsey's life are useful, not as Burne-Jones thought, to excuse his shortcomings though his shortcomings are plain, but to define his qualities, which, perhaps, the historians of literature have failed to perceive.

Joseph Skipsey was born on the 8th of July 1832 [1] at Percy Main, near North Shields, in the midst of a turbulent strike.  The pitmen wanted two shillings and sevenpence a day and a twelve hour day (with waiting time at the shaft that would make at least thirteen hours on most days) but the coal owners got the help of special constables to club such extremists back to work.  Joseph's father, Cuthbert Skipsey, overman at the pit, stepped between one of the special constables and a man he was bullying, and was shot dead by the constable for his intervention.  The zealous ruffian was sent to prison for six months and Mrs.  Skipsey was left without pension or relief to feed her eight children on nettle broth until they were old enough to go down the pit.  That was not long.  The youngest, Joseph, was set on as a trapper at the age of seven, to regulate the ventilation by opening and shutting a door when the wagons passed through for sixteen hours a day - the strike had failed.  What Joseph earned is not recorded, but can be inferred from the fact that ten years later, when he was promoted to be a putter, he was paid five shillings a week.

The coal owners were much too thrifty to supply candles to trapper boys.  The children sat in the dark.  Except towards midsummer they never saw light at all except on Sundays (for they started before dawn and ended after sunset) unless a passing hewer or putter might spare one of them a candleend.  By such occasional light Joseph taught himself to read and write, imitating the print on playbills and throwaway advertisements in chalk or finger-tracings on his dusty door.  William Straker, president of the Northumberland miners, told me that he had a similar education a score of years later.  My great-grandfather got no candles.  He taught himself to play the tin whistle when he was a trapper in the dark.

Some pits lowered and raised their men and boys in cages, as now.  Other coal owners thought that made men soft.  They provided only ladders, or else an endless chain with stirrups, to which weary children clung as best they could.  Skipsey saw another seven-year-old whose grip slackened.  He called to his brother behind him: "A'm gannen to faal, Jimmy".  "Slide doon to me, hinny", his brother answered, but could not hold him and both were killed at the shaft bottom.  William Straker's first pit had ladders, up which the boys swarmed, each followed by a man huddling up to catch him if he fell.  At home, Skipsey told Spence Watson, it was still nettle broth for supper, with a slice of bread on lucky days.

Before he owned a book or had seen more than a glimpse of the inside of one Skipsey made songs his mates picked up and sang.  "I have never known anyone who got more excellent enjoyment out of song", Spence Watson observed many years later.  Skipsey's first books, given him by an uncle when he was fifteen, were a Bible, Pope's Iliad and a worn Paradise Lost.  Two years later when he became a putter he saved out of his weekly five shillings to buy a Shakespeare.  He had tried to get the Bible by heart, but transferred the effort, more successfully, to Shakespeare from whom he could still quote whole scenes verbatim in old age.  He read Burns too, translations of Greek dramatists and a little political economy.  That may be said to have been his whole education, though he went on reading all his life and was certainly influenced both by Blake, and by Heine in translation.

At twenty Skipsey walked to London - the train was too dear - but found no other fortune there than a wife, whom he brought back to the north where they tried to set up a village school.  The fees were too small to live on, so for the rest of his life bar three short intervals Skipsey worked in the pits, though his friends tried several times to fit him into some more comfortable trade.  He was thought in Northumberland to be a very strong and skilful hewer and a reliable man for deputy, but the deputy's responsibilities lay so heavy upon him that he went back to his pick.

In 1859 his first book was printed at Morpeth.  It was hardly noticed.  However, three years later, when the whole country was horrified by the Hartley colliery disaster, Skipsey composed a ballad about it which he read at many meetings to gather funds for the widows and orphans.  Spence Watson says: "It was not at all like the reading or recitation of other men...  He waited quietly until he felt the spirit of that which he was about to do come upon him.  Then he was as one possessed, everything but the poem was forgotten, but that he made to live, or perhaps I should more truly say that he incarnated it; he actually became the poem himself.  His features changed with every expression of the verse, his hands, nay, even his fingers, expressed the meaning of the words, and that meaning thoroughly revealed itself.  It was far beyond what you had thought of, but it stood out clear for you ever afterwards."

Robert Spence Watson of Bensham was then a young Newcastle solicitor of an ancient Quaker yeoman family from Allendale.  His wide sympathies with the art and thought of his day and the great influence he gained behind the scenes of the radical section of the Liberals brought him an immense acquaintance ranging from Mazzini to the Pre-Raphaelites, from scholars to cabinet ministers, most of whom, when they became his guests, sat at table and conversed with Joseph Skipsey.  Skipsey's table-talk is said to have been trenchant and accurate.  Spence Watson's guests listened and marvelled, but usually did nothing to help the poet.  He did not become a part of the so-called world of letters, he was only brushed lightly by its fringe.

The other permanent friend Skipsey's early poems brought him was Thomas Dixon, the Sunderland cork-cutter to whom Ruskin addressed the letters published as Time and Tide.  Dixon's own letters are extant but have not been published, and I have not been allowed to consult them.  Ruskin's do not mention Skipsey.

Spence Watson had found a place for Skipsey as sub-librarian to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, but the pay was too meagre; and another, as porter at the newly founded Armstrong College, now the University of Newcastle on Tyne.  There Spence Watson's own middle-class marrow was curdled when Lord Carlisle, walking with the Principal, paused to talk to Skipsey, who set down two scuttles of coal to shake hands.  "It was quite impossible to have a college", Spence Watson wrote, "where the scientific men came to see the Principal and the artistic and literary men came to see the porter."  Burne Jones took pains to have Skipsey made custodian of Shakespeare's house at Stratford on Avon, just the job, he must have thought, for a poor man who knew almost all Shakespeare's work by heart.  The list of those who supported Skipsey's application included "Browning, Tennyson, John Morley, Burne Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Theodore Watts, Leighton, F.R.  Benson, Andrew Lang, Lord Carlisle, W.M.  Rossetti, Austin Dobson, Brain Stoker, Lord Ravensworth, Thomas Burt, William Morris, Wilson Barrett, Edmund Gosse, Professor Dowden and many other men of mark." This battalion prevailed, and the "tall, portly, well-proportioned man, with a fine grave face ...  a somewhat retiring and aloof expression" and a strong Northumbrian accent moved to Stratford-on-Avon to usher a continual flow of mainly American tourists through the rooms, answer their questions and put up, if he could, with their continual assertion that it was Bacon who wrote the plays.  Skipsey could not endure it and returned to the pits after a year.  Burne Jones tried again and persuaded Gladstone to grant Skipsey a Civil List Pension of £10 a year, raised later to £25.

Skipsey was master-shifter for a while, I think at Backworth, where he helped to give the village its reputation as a centre of workingmen's thought and education.  Throughout the eighties he was editing selections of Coleridge, Shelley, Burns, Blake, Poe and other poets in his spare time for the publishing house of Walter Scott at Felling.  His prefaces, like those of his contemporaries, are too long and too verbose, but sometimes unexpected or acute.

Three times in his later life Skipsey travelled for pleasure; once to visit the Lake District with the Spence Watsons and once on a rich Australian's yacht to sail up the Norwegian coast where he renewed his friendship with Fridjof Nansen a little before the Fram sailed on its famous North Pole voyage.  The other time, a little earlier, he went to London with Thomas Dixon to call on a number of Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters.  They probably met Ruskin too, but there is no record of it.

Skipsey lived to be 71.  His wife [2] died more than a year before him, and the dignified, rather austere old man was cared for by his housekeeper, a grand-daughter, Jane Skipsey, just twelve years old.  His son William was inspector of schools at Durham, his eldest son, James, [3] master shifter at the Montagu colliery at Scotswood, where Joseph Skipsey sometimes visited my father, the colliery doctor there; but I was too young to have any memory of him.  He died at Harraton in September 1903. [4]

It will be seen that I have hardly been able to add anything to the account Spence Watson gave of Skipsey in his memoir published in, I think, 1909, though I sought out several of the survivors of his family.  They remembered him with awe, but not with knowledge.

Spence Watson wrote rather distrustfully of Skipsey's poems.  Burne Jones dismissed them: "Of course his poems are not much to us; only one measures by relation', and sometimes the little that a man does who has had no chance whatever seems greater than the accomplished work of luckier men - on the widow's mite system of arithmetic.  .  ." Burne Jones and Spence Watson were not poets.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was, saw more clearly; "Joseph Skipsey, the Northern Collier Poet, a man of real genius."  There had been nobody to point out to Skipsey where his improvised technique failed him, so that his work is full of clumsinesses he could easily have avoided if he had once been shown how.  The reader must accept them, for the sake of the admirable poems they are embedded in.  Narrative and rhythm alike sometimes seem to stumble where there is no real obstacle.  When Rossetti pointed out one of these failures of technique, Skipsey was, I suppose, too set in the bad habit to change it.

Rossetti wrote: "I am gratified to know that my poems appeal at all to you.  Yours struck me at once.  The real-life pieces are more sustained and decided than almost anything of the same kind that I know, I mean in poetry coming really from a poet of the people who describes what he knows and mixes in.  Bereaved is perhaps the poem which most unites poetic form with deep pathos: the Hartley ballad is equal in another way, but written, I fancy, to be really sung like the old ballads.  Thistle and Nettle shows the most varied power of all, perhaps.  In this, and throughout the book, the want I feel is of artistic finish only, not of artistic tendency: the right touch sometimes seems to come to you of its own accord, but, when not thus coming, it remains a want.  Stanzas similarly rhymed are apt to follow each other, and the metre is often filled out by catching up a word in repetition - I mean, as for instance, 'Maybe, as they have been, maybe' etc.

"Other favourites of mine are Persecuted, Willy to Lilly, Mother Wept (this very striking) and Nanny to Bessy.  It seems to me that, as regards style, you might take the verbal perfection of your admirable stanzas Get Up as an example to yourself, and try never to fall short of this standard, where not a word is lost or wanting.  This little piece seems to me equal to anything in the language for direct and quiet pathetic force."

All Rossetti told Skipsey is just.  But a twentieth century reader may find faults that belong as much to the age he lived in as to Skipsey himself, occasional intrusions of what Samuel Butler called 'Wardour Street' into his vocabulary, for example.  'Wight' has no more place in modern English or modern Northumbrian as a synonym for 'man' than 'gome' or 'freke', though probably every voluminous poet of Victoria's reign hid a whole population of wights in his pages.  'Maid' is good English and good Devonshire, but we say 'lass'.  Such deviations irritate only a little, but often.

Skipsey was too ready to confuse his syntax in order to keep the stresses on the theoretical beat of the metre, not knowing, or not noticing, how one syllable drawn out beyond the metrical limit can keep the swing of the rhythm yet introduce an expressive change of pace; but in this too, though he was clumsier than many, he was following the usage of most poets of his time.  He does not use many dialect words nor many 'terms of art' from the collieries, but now and again he seems to have funked setting down the dialect syntax which was in his head and made clear sense to put in its place something of which it is hard to make sense at all.

Since Skipsey's own pronunciation was always that of Tyneside (but of Tyneside before the Irish navvy immigrants had made 'geordie' of it), I think the way to read his verse is to give the word spelled as the dictionary spells it the often unspellable sound it has between Alnwick, Hexham and Tynemouth.  If the page says 'called' I would read 'ca'd' except where metrical propriety forbids it, and so on.  But Skipsey baffles me when he rhymes 'night' ('neet') with 'wight', which has, so far as I know, no Northumbrian sound.  Its Old English sound would have fitted ('weet'), but it is not to be found in northern writers - once in Sir Gawain and once in Pearl, meaning, in each case, a young girl; in Beowulf, a thing.

But when all faults of technique, of vocabulary and of syntax have been added to the difficulty of reading a dialect written in the spelling of the capital Skipsey still has power to please and to move, sometimes, as Rossetti told him, as powerfully as anything in the language.  It is easy to feel the strength of the pitman's fear of the pit when he expresses it.  It may be less easy for such city-dwellers as we have become to acknowledge the truth of the pretty incidents of pit village courtship, especially since there is a convention which must be observed.  The things you may publicly admire in a girl, the things you may compare her to are fixed by what was originally a rustic tradition, withered in the towns and apologised for by villagers aware of town scrutiny, but not dead in the least.  Only the ornaments change a little.  The lad Skipsey's lasses admired for dancing and wrestling plays football now.  It is in handling such matter that Skipsey comes nearest to the folksong, at times, like it, practically anonymous.  But always he is very close indeed to the people and the life, as little embarrassed by its prettiness as by its pain.  Burns sees Ayr and Dumfries vividly but from outside.  He is not one with the people he observes.  But Skipsey hardly sees Cowpen and Percy Main at all.  He is inside the pit village, part of it, and but for a certain dignity of bearing, we might say he was the village itself composing.

So this preface comes back to its beginning.  Skipsey is the most impersonal of poets, very close indeed to the anonymous ballad singers and folksong singers, yet with his own voice and his own manner, holding a place of his own between them and such poets as Burns.  The best of his work is utterly convincing, even when its faults are obvious.  He ought not to be forgotten.  The general anthologists owe him a page or two.

 
Bibliography:

•     Poems, Songs, and Ballads.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1862.

•     The Collier Lad, and Other Lyrics, 1864.

•     Poems.  Blyth: William Alder, 1871.

•     A Book of Miscellaneous Lyrics.   Bedlington: printed for the author by George Richardson, 1878 .

•     Carols from the Coalfields.  London: Walter Scott, 1886.

•     Songs and Lyrics.  London: W.  Scott, 1892 (limited edition of 250 copies). 

•     Watson, Robert Spence.   Joseph Skipsey, his Life and Work.  London: T.F. Unwin, 1909.

•     Selected Poems.  Ed.  Basil Bunting.   Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1976.

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Footnotes.

(Information provided by Skipsey's great grandson, Roger J. Skipsey—
see also Family Documents)

 
1.    The date of birth given by Bunting is incorrect. Skipsey was born on 17th. of March 1832.
 
2.    Skipsey married Sarah Fendley in December 1868 (after the deaths of five of their children.)  Their three children who survived into old age were:

Elizabeth Ann Pringle Skipsey b. 1860, married John Harrison;

Joseph Skipsey b.1869 married Sarah Leech (three single daughters);

Cuthbert Skipsey b.1872 (one single daughter and my father, Joseph Fendley Skipsey).

 
3.    There is no record of sons James and William, or of a granddaughter Jane.
 
4.    Joseph Skipsey died on the 3rd. of September 1903 at my Grandfather`s home, 5 Kells Gardens, Low Fell, Gateshead.  Not with his daughter Elizabeth at Harraton.