People of Note
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate
Edward James Hughes, (1930-1998), poet and writer, was born on 17 August 1930 at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, near , West Yorkshire. He was the youngest of the three children of William Henry Hughes (1894–1981), a joiner, and his wife, Edith Farrar (1898–1969), a tailor. Gerald and Olwyn were his brother and sister.
The Farrars traced their ancestry back through the father of Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the religious community of Little Gidding, to William de Ferrières, who came over with William the Conqueror.
On the Hughes side there was Irish and possibly Spanish blood. The Hughes' immediate family were descended from farmers and hand-loom weavers from the Pennines, and the mill towns of the Calder Valley. The valley was the main link between the woollen towns of Yorkshire and the cotton towns of Lancashire.
Childhood. In Hughes's childhood his maternal grandmother's family was still farming at Hathershelf, although most of the family for two or three generations had worked in in the local woollen and clothing industries.
It is written that the imagination of the growing Hughes was shadowed by fearful images of trench warfare, images which were not difficult to match with the harsh images of nature struggling to survive and sometimes failing on the exposed moors.
His early childhood was spent exploring the nearby woods, with friends while his mother who loved walking, took her children at every opportunity to picnic, and go camping.
Education in Mexborough. Hughes attended Burnley Road School in Mytholmroyd until 1937, when the family moved to Mexborough, in South Yorkshire. His mother Edith, came into a small legacy after the death of her mother; his father bought a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop in Mexbrough. Gerald, now seventeen, did not move to Mexborough with the family but chose instead to take a job as a gamekeeper in Devon.
Hughes attended Schofield Street Junior school, and in 1943 Mexborough Grammar School, following in the steps of his sister Olwyn. While there, he discovered Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter in the school library , and this became his bible for two years. When Miss McLeod, his first English teacher, praised his writing, his mother bought him a whole secondhand library of classic poets. His favourite teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Fisher, fostered his creative writing, and Mayne later introduced him to Hopkins and Eliot. He received Robert Graves The White Goddess as a gift from Fisher. By the age of sixteen he had no thought of becoming anything but a poet. His first poems were published in Don and Deane, the School magazine.
Leisure time at Old Denaby and Conisbrough - Most of his primary school friends were the sons of colliers and railwaymen. He spent many of his weekend hours at Manor Farm at nearby Old Denaby where he wrote his first 'animal poems' The Thought Fox, and his first story, The Rain Horse, were both memories of encounters there.
At about thirteen his new friend John Wholey, a boy in Olwyn's class, at Mexbrough Grammar School, introduced Hughes to the Crookhill Estate at Conisborough, where his father was head gamekeeper. The estate was later sold to Doncaster local authority as a sanatorium for TB patients. John's father had once worked as a gamekeeper for Lord Halifax, the first Earl, who had served as Foreign Secretary under Sir Anthony Eden. Wholey was extremely knowledgeable about country life and Ted learned a great deal from him.
His friendship with John gave him access to acres of parkland, woods and a huge lake, where he had his first experience of fishing for pike. John and Ted caught three baby pike which they placed into a fish-tank at school, feeding them regularly at first. The boys forgot about them over a school holiday, and returned to find the three fish reduced to one: an act of cannibalism recorded in Ted's poem Pike
Hughes became part of the Wholey family, often staying with them over the weekend. Sometimes Ted went off for hours by himself with a book or pencil and paper. He would read poems or passages of Greek drama to Edna, John's older sister. The two boys cycled all over South Yorkshire fishing and shooting.
In the book Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, the author writes: Ted's interest in pike fishing in his teens approached an obsession. He spoke of dreaming regularly about pike and about one particular lake where he did most of his fishing. 'Pike had become fixed at some very active, deep level in my imaginative life.' It was as if pike had become symbolic of his inner, vital being, though he would hardly have been able to articulate that thought in his teenage years. He remained more interested in the world outside school than anything he learned there, and he returned to Mytholmroyd in the long school holidays to visit his Aunt Hilda and to see his old friends. But the move to Mexborough was in other ways crucial to his development as a poet.
The Shop in Mexbrough - His father's newspaper shop was always busy, with excitements of its own. Ted was able to read the comics and boys’ magazines freely there, and these were to be the basis of his first attempts at storytelling. He also formed the habit of buying the Shooting Times and the Gamekeeper, which he read avidly, since he continued to be obsessed with shooting, fishing and trapping. These magazines made a link between the world of outside-school freedom and the world of book-knowledge, which he might not have acquired while Gerald was there to teach him all he needed to know. In the early days the Hughes home held few books, although his mother read poetry and particularly loved Wordsworth. The only stories that Ted heard as a young child were ones told by his mother and usually made up by her. It was her who brought a children's encyclopaedia into the house; it included a section on folk tales, which Ted read with great delight.
In 1948 Hughes won a Scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied English, Anthropology and Archaeology. Before going there, he served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force, as a radio mechanic based at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire, where he had little to do but read Shakespeare and Yeats until he knew them almost by heart.
Hughes graduated in 1954, and later that year, he published his first poem (other than in his school magazine), The Little Boys and the Seasons, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing; he also wrote the first of the poems which appeared in The Hawk in the Rain. He used two pseudonyms for the early publications, Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew.
After graduation, he had a number of jobs, including rose gardener, night-watchman, zoo attendant, at the cafeteria in London Zoo, and reader for J. Arthur Rank. He was now living in Rugby Street, London, and sometimes in Cambridge. He planned to teach in Spain then emigrate to Australia
In February, 1956 ,while attending a party celebrating the launch of a poetry magazine,which Hughes was one of six co-producers, St Botolph's Review, that met his soon to be first wife, Sylvia Plath , a 23-year-old Fulbright scholar from Northampton, Massachusetts, she was at Newnham College. They were immediately attracted, although a second meeting did not take place until 23 March, they were married that year by special licence at St George the Martyr's Church, Bloomsbury, on 16 June .
It was not until later that Hughes learned about her medical history. The marriage lasted 7 years, they had 2 children, a daughter, Frieda, was born in April 1960, and a son, Nicholas, born in January 1962.
September 1962 saw Hughes and Plath separating, she and the two children moved to a flat in London. In 1963 she died .
Much has been written elsewhere about Ted Hughes, here are a few highlights:
- After the death of Sylvia Plath , he produced two poems, The Howling of Wolves and Song of a Rat, nothing was heard from him for about three years.
- Eventually, he was supporting his family by broadcasting, and reviewing in the weekly press.
- Many of Hughes works for children grew out of the stories he told his own children and most of his plays began as radio plays for schools.
- In March 1969 Hughes gave his first televised reading
- In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, daughter of Herbert Orchard, a Devon farmer.
- In 1972, he bought a 95 acre farm, where, with his wife and her father, bred sheep and South Devon cattle.
- Hughes was awarded the OBE in 1977.
- Appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, which he held until his death on 28th October 1998.
- In 1998 'Birthday Letters', won the T. S. Eliot, Whitbread, South Bank, and book of the year prizes.
- The Queen invested the late Poet Laureate,with the Order of Merit on 16 October 1998. He died two weeks later from cancer.
- His daughter Frieda, became a successful painter and poet in Australia, and his son Nicholas, graduated from Oxford with a degree in zoology.
A thanksgiving and memorial service was held on 13th May, 1999, at Westminster Abbey.
Offsite Link Read more about Ted Hughes
Offsite Link Read more about Sylvia Plath