Pam Ayres

Pam Ayres MBE (born 14 March 1947) is an English poet, songwriter and presenter of radio and television.

Pam Ayres was born at Stanford in the Vale in the English county of Berkshire. After leaving Faringdon Secondary School at the age of 15, she joined the Civil Service as a clerical assistant. She soon left and signed up for the Women’s Royal Air Force, and it was there that she chose her career as an entertainer. She began reading her verses at the local folk club in Oxfordshire, and this led to an invitation to read on the local BBC radio station in 1974. Her reading was re-broadcast nationally, and then broadcast again as one of the BBC’s Pick of the Year.

In September 2006, a BBC website stated that Bob Dylan inspired Pam Ayres to write poetry, although in an interview (aired on Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon programme, 24 October 2006) Pam stated that the Lonnie Donegan records her brother played were her inspiration.

In 1975 Ayres appeared on the television talent show Opportunity Knocks. This led to a wide variety of guest appearances on TV and radio shows. Since then she has published six books of poems, toured in a one woman stage show, briefly hosted her own TV show and performed her stage show for the Queen.

Her poetry has a simple style and deals with everyday subject matter. Her poem I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, was voted into the Top 10 of a BBC poll to find the Nation’s 100 Favourite Comic Poems. In the UK Arts Council’s report on poetry Ayres was identified as the fifth best-selling poet in Britain during 1998 and 1999. However, in 2000 her TV show was ranked at number 64 in Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Moments from TV Hell.

Ayres is married to theatre producer Dudley Russell, and they have two sons, William and James. They live in the Cotswolds, and keep some rare breeds of cattle, as well as some sheep, pigs, chickens, and guinea fowl. Pam is a keen gardener and beekeeper. She is a patron of the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.

In June 2004 she was awarded the MBE for services to literature and entertainment. Pam continues to actively perform her work, the humorous quality of which is enhanced by her idiosyncratic delivery and ‘country bumpkin’ accent. Starting in September 2006 to coincide with the release of her latest book and audio CD, Ayres gave dozens of performances in various locations in the United Kingdom and Australia, with additional dates scheduled for the UK and New Zealand in 2007.

From 1996, Ayres has appeared frequently on BBC Radio: from 1996 until 1999 Pam presented a two-hour music and chat show every Sunday afternoon on BBC Radio 2; this was followed by two series of Pam Ayres’ Open Road, in which Pam visited various parts of the United Kingdom, interviewing people with interesting stories to tell about their lives and local areas. More recently Pam has become a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, appearing in programmes such as Just a Minute, Say The Word, That Reminds Me, and two series of her own show, Ayres On The Air, a radio show of her poetry and sketches.

In mid-2007, Ayres started work acting in a new radio sitcom, Potting On for BBC Radio 4, in which she co-stars with actor Geoffrey Whitehead. She wrote and recorded three series of her BBC Radio 4 programme Ayres On The Air, the latest of which was broadcast in the late summer of 2009.

Since 2002 Ayres has appeared a number of times on Channel Four in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner alongside Susie Dent. On Friday 16 January 2009 she made her first appearance on BBC TV programme QI.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington (8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962), born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.

Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry. His 1946 biography, Wellington, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Aldington was born in Portsmouth, the son of a solicitor, and educated at Dover College, and for a year at the University of London. He was unable to complete his degree because of the financial circumstances of his family. He met the poet H.D. in 1911 and they married two years later.

His poetry was associated with the Imagist group, and his work forms almost one third of the Imagists’ inaugural anthology Des Imagistes (1914). Ezra Pound had in fact coined the term imagistes for H.D. and Aldington, in 1912.

At this time, he was one of the poets around the proto-Imagist T. E. Hulme; Robert Ferguson in his life of Hulme portrays Aldington as too squeamish to approve of Hulme’s robust approach, particularly to women. He knew Wyndham Lewis well, also, reviewing his work in The Egoist at this time, hanging a Lewis portfolio around the room and on a similar note of tension between the domestic and the small circle of London modernists regretting having lent Lewis his razor when the latter announced with hindsight a venereal infection. Going out without a hat, and an interest in Fabian socialism, were perhaps unconventional enough for him. At this time he was also an associate of Ford Madox Hueffer, helping him with a hack propaganda volume for a government commission in 1914 and taking dictation for The Good Soldier when H.D. found it too harrowing.

In 1915, Aldington and H.D. moved within London, away from Holland Park very near Ezra Pound and Dorothy, to Hampstead, close to D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Their relationship became strained by external romantic interests and the stillborn birth of their child. Between 1914 and 1916 he was literary editor of The Egoist, and columnist there. He was assistant editor with Leonard Compton-Rickett under Dora Marsden. The gap between the Imagist and Futurist groups was defined partly by Aldington’s critical disapproval of the poetry of Filippo Marinetti.

He joined the army in 1916, was commissioned in the Royal Sussexs in 1917 and was wounded on the Western Front Aldington never completely recovered from his war experiences, and may have continued to suffer from the then-unrecognised phenomenon of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Aldington and H. D. attempted to mend their marriage in 1919, after the birth of her daughter by a friend of writer D. H. Lawrence, named Cecil Gray, with whom she had become involved and lived with while Aldington was at war. However, she was by this time deeply involved in a lesbian relationship with the wealthy writer Bryher, and she and Aldington formally separated, both becoming romantically involved with other people, but they did not divorce until 1938. They remained friends, however, for the rest of their lives.

He helped T. S. Eliot in a practical way, by persuading Harriet Shaw Weaver to appoint Eliot as his successor at The Egoist (helped by Pound), and later in 1919 with an introduction to the editor Bruce Richmond of the Times Literary Supplement, for which he reviewed French literature. He was on the editorial board, with Conrad Aiken, Eliot, Lewis and Aldous Huxley, of Chaman Lall’s London literary quarterly Coterie published 1919-1921. With Lady Ottoline Morrell, Leonard Woolf and Harry Norton he took part in Ezra Pound’s scheme to ‘get Eliot out of the bank’ (Eliot had a job in the international department of Lloyd’s, a London bank, and well-meaning friends wanted him full-time writing poetry). This manoeuvre towards Bloomsbury came to little, with Eliot getting £50 and unwelcome publicity in the Liverpool Post, but gave Lytton Strachey an opening for mockery.

Aldington made an effort with A Fool I’ the Forest (1924) to reply to the new style of poetry launched by The Waste Land. He was being published at the time, for example in The Chapbook, but clearly took on too much hack work just to live. He suffered some sort of breakdown in 1925. His interest in poetry waned, and he was straighforwardly jealous of Eliot’s celebrity.

His attitude towards Eliot shifted, from someone who would mind the Eliots’ cat in his cottage (near Reading, Berkshire, in 1921), and to whom Eliot could confide his self-diagnosis of abulia. Aldington became a supporter of Vivienne Eliot in the troubled marriage, and the savage satirist on her husband, as “Jeremy Cibber” in Stepping Heavenward (Florence 1931). He was at this time living with Arabella Yorke (real given name Dorothy), a lover since Mecklenburgh Square days. It was a lengthy and passionate relationship, coming to an end when he went abroad.

He went into self-imposed ‘exile’ from England in 1928. He lived in Paris for years, living with Brigit Patmore, and being fascinated by Nancy Cunard whom he met in 1928. After his divorce in 1938 he married Netta, née McCullough, previously Brigit’s daughter-in-law as Mrs. Michael Patmore.

Death of a Hero, published in 1929, was his literary response to the war, commended by Lawrence Durrell as ‘the best war novel of the epoch’. It was written as a development of a manuscript from a decade before, as he lived on the island of Port Crau in Provence. The book opens with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, and takes a variable but satirical, cynical and critical posture, and belabours Victorian and Edwardian cant. He went on to publish several works of fiction.

In 1930, he published a bawdy translation of The Decameron. In 1942, having moved to the United States with his new wife Netta Patmore, he began to write biographies. The first was one of Wellington (The Duke: Being an Account of the Life & Achievements of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1943). It was followed by works on D. H. Lawrence (Portrait of a Genius, But…, 1950), Robert Louis Stevenson (Portrait of a Rebel, 1957), and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry, 1955).

Aldington’s biography of T. E. Lawrence caused a scandal on its publication, and an immediate backlash. It made many controversial assertions. He was the first to bring to public notice the fact of Lawrence’s illegitimacy. He also asserted that Lawrence was homosexual. Lawrence lived a celibate life, and none of his close friends (of whom several were homosexual) had believed him to be gay. He attacked Lawrence as a liar and a charlatan, claims which have colored Lawrence’s reputation ever since. Only later were confidential government files concerning Lawrence’s career released, allowing the accuracy of Lawrence’s own account to be gauged. Aldington’s own reputation has never fully recovered from what came to be seen as a venomous attack upon Lawrence’s reputation. Many believed that Aldington’s suffering in the bloodbath of Europe during World War I caused him to resent Lawrence’s reputation, gained in the Middle Eastern arena.

Aldington died in France on 27 July 1962, shortly after being honoured and feted in Moscow on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. His politics had in fact moved far towards the right — opinions he shared with Lawrence Durrell, a close friend since the 1950s — but he had felt shut out by the British establishment after his T. E. Lawrence book. He lived in Provence, at Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence.

On 11 November 1985, Aldington was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner. The inscription on the stone is a quotation from the work of a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Aldington could write with an acid pen. The Georgian poets, who (Pound had decided) were the Imagists’ sworn enemies, he devastated with the accusation of a little trip for a little weekend to a little cottage where they wrote a little poem on a little theme. He took swipes at Harold Monro, whose Poetry Review had published him and given him reviewing work. On the other side of the balance sheet, he spent time supporting literary folk: the alcoholic Monro, and others such as F. S. Flint and Frederic Manning who needed friendship.

Alec Waugh, who met him through Harold Monro, described him as embittered by the war, and offered Douglas Goldring as comparison; but took it that he worked off his spleen in novels like The Colonel’s Daughter (1931), rather than letting it poison his life. His novels in fact contained thinly-veiled, disconcerting (at least to the subjects) portraits of some of his friends (Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Pound in particular), the friendship not always surviving. Lyndall Gordon characterises the sketch of Eliot in the memoirs Life for Life’s Sake (1941) as ’snide’. As a young man he enjoyed being cutting about William Butler Yeats, but remained on good enough terms to visit him in later years at Rapallo.

An obituary described him as an “angry young man”, and an ‘”angry old man to the end”.