Charles Causley

Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet, school teacher and writer.

His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.

Causley was born at Launceston, Cornwall, to Charles Samuel Causley, who worked as a groom and gardener, and his wife Laura Jane Bartlett, who was in domestic service.

He was educated at the local primary school and Launceston College.

When he was seven, in 1924, his father died from long-standing injuries incurred in World War I.

Causley left school at 16, working as a clerk in a builder's office.

He played in a semi-professional dance band, and wrote plays—one of which was broadcast on the BBC West Country service before World War II.

He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1940 and served as an ordinary seaman during the Second World War, firstly aboard the destroyer HMS Eclipse in the Atlantic, at shore bases in Gibraltar and northwest England.

Later he served in the Pacific on the aircraft carrier HMS Glory, after promotion to petty officer.

Causley later wrote about his wartime experiences (and their longer-term impact on him) in his poetry, and also in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark.

After demobilisation in 1946, he took advantage of a government scheme to train as a teacher at Peterborough.

He then worked full-time as a teacher at his old school for over 35 years, teaching for his very final year at St. Catherine's CofE Primary elsewhere in the town, where the National School had been relocated.

He twice spent time in Perth as a visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and also worked at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada.

His first collection of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951) contained the 'Song of the Dying Gunner A.A.1':

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz,

Hang my tiddley suit on the door

I'm sewn up neat in a canvas sheet

And I shan't be home no more.

In 1952 Causley was made a bard of Gorsedh Kernow adopting the bardic name Morvardh (Sea poet).

The collection Survivor's Leave followed in 1953, and from then until his death Causley published frequently, in magazines, in his own volumes and shared ones, in anthologies and then in several editions of his Collected Poems.

In 1958 Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he was made a CBE in 1986.

When he was 83 years old he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature: he greeted this award with the words, "My goodness, what an encouragement!"

Other awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1971.

Causley travelled still more widely and frequently, however, after taking early retirement in 1976 to pursue a full-time career in writing.

He was much in demand at poetry readings in the United Kingdom and worldwide—the latter travels were sometimes as part of Arts Council and British Council initiatives.

He also made many television and radio appearances over the post-war period, particularly for the BBC in the West Country, and as the presenter for many years of the BBC Radio 4 series Poetry Please.

An intensely private person, he was nevertheless approachable and friendly.

He corresponded with and was well-acquainted with such writers as Siegfried Sassoon, A. L. Rowse, Susan Hill, Jack Clemo and Ted Hughes (his closest friend)—and a host of other figures from the literary, publishing and wider cultural spheres around the world, as well the southwest region.

In addition to Causley's poetry dealing with issues of faith, folklore, memory, his wartime experience and its later impact, landscape, travel, friends and family, his poems for children were and remain very popular.

He used to say that he could have lived comfortably on the fees paid for the reproduction of 'Timothy Winters':

Timothy Winters comes to school

With eyes as wide as a football pool,

Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

—first verse

So come one angel, come on ten:

Timothy Winters says "Amen Amen amen amen amen."

Timothy Winters, Lord.

Amen.

—last verse