W. H. Davies

Plaque commemorating Davies' supposed place of birth, at "The Church House Inn", in Pillgwenlly, Newport, Wales.

The son of an iron moulder, Davies was born at 6 Portland Street in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport, Monmouthshire, a busy port. He had an older brother, Francis Gomer Boase, who was considered "slow." In 1874 a sister, Matilda, was born.

In November 1874, William was aged three when his father died. The next year his mother, Mary Anne Davies, remarried as Mrs Joseph Hill. She agreed that care of the three children should pass to their paternal grandparents, Francis and Lydia Davies, who ran the nearby Church House Inn at 14 Portland Street. His grandfather Francis Boase Davies, originally from Cornwall, had been a sea captain. Davies was related to the British actor Sir Henry Irving, known as Cousin Brodribb to the family. He later recalled his grandmother speaking of Irving as "the cousin who brought disgrace on us." According to a neighbour's memories, she wore "pretty little caps, with bebe ribbon, tiny roses and puce trimmings."[3] Osbert Sitwell, introducing the 1943 Collected Poems of W. H. Davies, recalled Davies telling him that along with his grandparents and himself, his home held "an imbecile brother, a sister... a maidservant, a dog, a cat, a parrot, a dove and a canary bird." Sitwell also recounts how Davies's grandmother, a Baptist, was "of a more austere and religious turn of mind than her husband."[4]

In 1879 the family moved to Raglan Street, Newport, then to Upper Lewis Street, where William attended Temple School. In 1883 he moved to Alexandra Road School and the following year was arrested, as one of five schoolmates charged with stealing handbags. He was given twelve strokes of the birch. In 1885 Davies wrote his first poem entitled "Death."

In Poet's Pilgrimage (1918), Davies recalls that at the age of 14 he was left with orders to sit with his dying grandfather. He missed the final moments of his grandfather's death as he was too engrossed in reading "a very interesting book of wild adventure."[5]

After school, Davies worked as an ironmonger. In November 1886 his grandmother signed Davies up for a five-year apprenticeship to a local picture-frame maker. Davies never enjoyed the craft. He left Newport, took casual work and began his travels. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) covers his American life in 1893–1899, including adventures and characters from his travels as a drifter. During the period, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean at least seven times on cattle ships. He travelled through many states doing seasonal work.

Davies took advantage of the corrupt system of "boodle" to pass the winter in Michigan by agreeing to be locked in a series of jails. Here with his fellow tramps Davies enjoyed relative comfort in "card-playing, singing, smoking, reading, relating experiences, and occasionally taking exercise or going out for a walk."[6] At one point on his way to Memphis, Tennessee, he lay alone in a swamp for three days and nights suffering from malaria.[2]

The turning point in Davies's life came after a week of rambling in London. He spotted a newspaper story about the riches to be made in the Klondike and set off to make his fortune in Canada. Attempting with a fellow tramp, Three-fingered Jack, to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario on 20 March 1899, he lost his footing and his right foot was crushed under the wheels of the train. The leg was amputated below the knee and he wore a pegleg thereafter. Davies' biographers agree the accident was crucial, although Davies played down the story. Moult begins his biography with the incident,[7] and his biographer Richard J. Stonesifer suggested this event, more than any other, led Davies to become a professional poet.[8] Davies writes, "I bore this accident with an outward fortitude that was far from the true state of my feelings. Thinking of my present helplessness caused me many a bitter moment, but I managed to impress all comers with a false indifference.... I was soon home again, away less than four months; but all the wildness was taken out of me, and my adventures after this were not of my seeking, but the result of circumstances."[9] Davies took an ambivalent view of his disability. In his poem "The Fog", published in the 1913 Foliage,[10] a blind man leads the poet through the fog, showing the reader how someone impaired in one domain may have a big advantage in another.

Davies returned to Britain, to a rough life, largely in London shelters and doss-houses, including a Salvation Army hostel in Southwark known as "The Ark",[11] which he grew to despise. Fearing contempt from fellow tramps, he often feigned slumber in the corner of a doss-house, mentally composing his poems, then later committing them to paper in private. At one point, he borrowed money to print poems, which he sold door-to-door in residential London. After that enterprise failed, he returned to his lodgings and burned all of the printed sheets.[8]

Davies self-published his first slim book of poetry, The Soul's Destroyer, in 1905, again by means of his savings. It proved to be the beginning of success and a growing reputation. To publish it, Davies forwent his allowance to live as a tramp for six months (with the first draft of the book hidden in his pocket), just to secure a loan of funds from his inheritance. After it was published, the volume was ignored. He resorted to posting individual copies by hand to prospective wealthy customers chosen from the pages of Who's Who, asking them to send the price of the book, a half crown, in return. He sold 60 of the 200 copies printed.[2] One of the copies went to Arthur St John Adcock, then a journalist with the Daily Mail. On reading the book, he later wrote in his essay "Gods of Modern Grub Street", Adcock said he "recognised there were crudities and doggerel in it, there was also in it some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books."[8] He sent the price of the book, then asked Davies to meet him. Adcock is seen as "the man who discovered Davies."[8] The first trade edition of The Soul's Destroyer was published by Alston Rivers in 1907. A second edition followed in 1908 and a third in 1910. A 1906 edition, by Fifield, was advertised but has not been verified.[12]

On 12 October 1905 Davies met Edward Thomas, then literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London, who did more to help him than anyone else.[8] Thomas rented for Davies the tiny two-roomed Stidulph's Cottage in Egg Pie Lane, not far from his own home at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent. Davies moved to the cottage from 6 Llanwern Street, Newport, via London, in the second week of February 1907. The cottage was "only two meadows off" from Thomas's house.[13]

In 1907, the manuscript of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who agreed to write a preface (largely through the efforts of his wife Charlotte). It was only through Shaw that Davies' contract with the publishers was rewritten to retain him the serial rights, all rights after three years, royalties of 15 per cent of selling price, and a non-returnable advance of £25. Davies was also to be given a say in the style of illustrations, advertisement layouts and cover designs. The original publisher, Duckworth and Sons, rejected the new terms and the book passed to the London publisher Fifield.[8]

Several anecdotes of Davies's time with the Thomas family appear in a brief account later published by Thomas's widow Helen.[14] In 1911, he was awarded a Civil List pension of £50,[15] later increased to £100 and then to £150.

Davies began to spend more time in London and make many literary friends and acquaintances. Though averse to giving autographs himself, he began to make a collection of his own and was particularly keen to obtain that of D. H. Lawrence. The Georgian poetry publisher Edward Marsh secured this and also invited Lawrence and wife-to-be Frieda to meet Davies on 28 July 1913. Lawrence was captivated by Davies and later invited him to join them in Germany. Despite his early enthusiasm, however, Lawrence's opinion changed after reading Foliage and he commented after reading Nature Poems in Italy that the verses seemed "so thin, one can hardly feel them."[8]

By this time Davies had a library of some fifty books at his cottage, mostly 16th and 17th-century poets, among them Shakespeare, Milton, Worsdsworth, Byron, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake and Herrick.[16] In December 1908 his essay "How It Feels To Be Out of Work", described by Stonesifer as "a rather pedestrian performance", appeared in The English Review. He continued to send other periodical articles to editors, but without success.[17]

Davies in 1915

After lodging at several addresses in Sevenoaks, Davies moved back to London early in 1914, settling eventually at 14 Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district,[lower-alpha 2] Here he lived from early 1916 until 1921 in a tiny two-room apartment initially infested with mice and rats and next door to the rooms of a noisy Belgian prostitute. During this London period, Davies embarked on a series of public readings of his work, alongside others such as Hilaire Belloc and W. B. Yeats, impressing fellow poet Ezra Pound. He soon found he could socialise with leading society figures of the day, including Arthur Balfour and Lady Randolph Churchill. While in London he also took up with artists such as Jacob Epstein, Harold and Laura Knight, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Harold Gilman, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Sir William Nicholson and Osbert and Edith Sitwell. He enjoyed the society and conversation of literary men, particularly in the rarefied downstairs at the Café Royal. He also met regularly with W. H. Hudson, Edward Garrett and others at The Mont Blanc in Soho.[19]

For his poetry Davies drew much on experiences with the seamier side of life, but also on his love of nature. By the time he took a prominent place in the Edward Marsh Georgian Poetry series, he was an established figure, generally known for the opening lines of the poem "Leisure", first published in Songs of Joy and Others in 1911: "What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare...."

In October 1917 his work appeared in the anthology Welsh Poets: A Representative English selection from Contemporary Writers collated by A. G. Prys-Jones and published by Erskine Macdonald of London.[20][21]

In 1921, Davies moved to 13 Avery Row, Brook Street, renting from Quaker poet Olaf Baker. He was finding work difficult with rheumatism and other ailments. Harlow (1993) lists a total of 14 BBC broadcasts of Davies reading his work made between 1924 and 1940 (now held in the BBC broadcast archive)[22] though none included his most famous work, "Leisure". Later Days, a 1925 sequel to The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, describes the beginnings of Davies's writing career and his acquaintance with Belloc, Shaw, de la Mare and others. He became "the most painted literary man of his day", thanks to Augustus John, Sir William Nicholson, Dame Laura Knight and Sir William Rothenstein. Epstein's bronze of Davies's head was a successful smaller work.[19]

Davies' last home "Glendower", Watledge Road, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire

On 5 February 1923, Davies married 23-year-old Helen Matilda Payne at the Register Office, East Grinstead, Sussex, and the couple set up home in the town at Tor Leven, Cantelupe Road. According to a witness, Conrad Aiken, the ceremony found Davies "in a near panic".[8][23]

Davies's book Young Emma was a frank, often disturbing account of his life before and after picking Helen up at a bus-stop in the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. He had caught sight of her just getting off the bus and describes her wearing a "saucy-looking little velvet cap with tassels".[24] Still unmarried, Helen was pregnant at the time.[lower-alpha 3] While living with Davies in London, before the couple were married, Helen suffered a dramatic, almost fatal miscarriage.

Although Davies eagerly sent the manuscript for Young Emma to Jonathan Cape in August 1924, he later changed his mind and asked for it to be returned and the copies destroyed. Only Davies' lack of direct instructions prompted Cape to keep the copies secretly in a locked safe. After Davies's death, George Bernard Shaw was asked by Cape for his views and advised against publication. The book eventually appeared only after Helen's death in 1979.[25]

The couple lived quietly and happily, moving from East Grinstead to Sevenoaks, then to Malpas House, Oxted in Surrey, and finally to a string of five residences at Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, the first being a comfortable, detached 19th-century stone-built house. Axpills (later known as Shenstone), with a garden of character. He lived in several houses, all close to one another, in his last seven years.[19] His last home was the small roadside cottage Glendower in the hamlet of Watledge. The couple had no children.

In 1930 Davies edited the poetry anthology Jewels of Song for Cape, choosing works by over 120 poets, including William Blake, Thomas Campion, Shakespeare, Tennyson and W. B. Yeats. Of his own poems he added only "The Kingfisher" and "Leisure". The collection reappeared as An Anthology of Short Poems in 1938.

In September 1938, Davies attended the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the Church House Inn; poet laureate, John Masefield, gave an address. Davies was unwell and did not make another public appearance.[2]

Before his marriage to Helen, Davies had regularly visited London and stayed with Osbert Sitwell and his brother Sacheverell. He enjoyed walking with them along the river from the Houses of Parliament to the Physic Garden, near their house in Chelsea. On these visits, he often called on a Sunday afternoon for recitals on the harpsichord and clavichord by Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Having moved to Watledge, William and Helen continued to visit her at her house in Nether Lypiatt, near Stroud, to dine with the Sitwells.

About three months before he died, Davies was visited at Glendower by Gordon Woodhouse and the Sitwells, Davies being too ill to travel to dinner at Nether Lypiatt. Osbert Sitwell noted that Davies looked "very ill", but that "his head, so typical of him in its rustic and nautical boldness, with the black hair now greying a little, but as stiff as ever, surrounding his high bony forehead, seemed to have acquired an even more sculptural quality." Helen privately told Sitwell that Davies' heart showed "alarming symptoms of weakness" caused, according to doctors, by the continuous dragging weight of his wooden leg. Helen kept the true extent of the medical diagnosis from her husband.

Davies himself confided in Sitwell:

I've never been ill before, really, except when I had that accident and lost my leg.... And, d'you know, I grow so irritable when I've got that pain, I can't bear the sound of people's voices.... Sometimes I feel I should like to turn over on my side and die.[4]

Davies' health continued to decline. He died in September 1940 at the age of 69. Never a churchgoer in adult life, Davies was cremated at the Bouncer's Lane Cemetery, Cheltenham, and his remains interred there.[26]

From 1949, Glendower was the home of the poet's great-nephew Norman Phillips. In 2003, Phillips had a heart attack and had to move into council accommodation. He later spent £34,000 on the house, hoping to move back, but faced a further five-figure sum for essential maintenance. Local residents such as Anthony Burton and biographer Barbara Hooper formed The Friends of Glendower to help save the property and promote the poet's work.[27][28]

In December 2012 signed copies of five of Davies' books were found during restoration of his cottage, along with letters to family members. The restorers hoped that the books would remain in Nailsworth and the cottage become a Davies study centre. The plans included its use as a home by Phillips, who was among the last direct descendants of the Davies family.[29]