Walter de la Mare,

St Paul's Cathedral chorister 1883-1889

Walter de la Mare was a man of letters and is now well known as one of Britain's leading poets and
novelists of the 20th century, writing for both adults and children. He was also a literary critic,
serving as the main critic on the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for many years. He died in 1956,
aged 83.

1 - St Paul's Cathedral had 'radically reformed' its musical and spiritual life 'after long
neglect' and restored its national prestige.
2 - Life in the choir and choir school
3 - Fun half-days and the discovery of poetry
4 - Befriended and inspired by Canon Scott-Holland
5 - Jacks voice breaks and the Choristers Journal is founded
6 - The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
7 - More online sources of works by Walter de la Mare

Part 1 - St Paul's Cathedral had 'radically reformed' its musical and spiritual life 'after long
neglect' and restored its national prestige.

Walter John ('Jack') de la Mare was born on 25th April, 1873 in Charlton, Woolwich, south London.
He was a chorister in St Paul's Cathedral for 6 years, from the age of 10, and his ashes are buried
in the crypt of the Cathedral. Later in life he became well known as an English man of letters,
writing mainly poetry and short stories.

This blog post is an extract from Chapter 2 (Schooldays) of The Life of Walter de
la Mare, by Theresa Whistler (published in 1993/2003). Used by permission of
Duckworth Publishers, 30 Calvin Street, London E1 6NW (www.ducknet.co.uk or
+44 (0)20 7490 7300). Now out of print, used copies may be obtainable via
Amazon (UK).
Walter (known as Jack in his family) showed promise of a good voice when he joined in singing the
family favourites, such as O Ruddier than the Cherry. A blind lady, Mrs Hitchman, lived not far from
Woolwich and was engaged to give him coaching, in hopes of a choir-school place at St Pauls
Cathedral. Mrs Hitchman was a purposeful, remarkable woman, and a good friend to Jack, who
became devoted to her, though always in awe of her.

The coaching only just succeeded. At the first voice-test at St Pauls he failed, but they gave him
another chance. On 21 March 1882, at 2 oclock, his mother, Lucy, and he presented themselves
again at Choir House, and this time he was accepted. It must have been a great relief to his
mother. But for Jack, who was 10 years old when he entered the school in 1883, childhood proper
was over, to be rivalled by no other experience in life:

Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and
darting ... though at the actual time more closely resembled, perhaps, a continuous dream broken
into bits of vivid awakening".
 (left) Edward Pusey by caricaturist Carlo Pellegrini, from Vanity Fair, 1875

St Pauls was a place of education that his Uncle Abraham, a

clergyman, would have shunned above any. By the early 1880s
the Cathedral had become the very fountainhead of High
Church notions. Disciples of Edward Bouverie Pusey and the
Tractarians (see The Oxford Movement) had taken it over just
before de la Mare was born, radically reforming its musical and
spiritual life after long neglect.

By the time he entered the choir they had restored St Pauls to a

position of national prestige it had not held since (Dean John)
Donnes day (1621-1631). It was a notable revival. Wrens
baroque masterpiece had long fallen out of favour, and the vast
spaces of the interior had lain almost totally naked and unused,
except at the burial of a hero, like the Duke of Wellington in
1852, or such annual occasions as the festival of the Charity
Children the ceremony described by William Blake in the poem Holy Thursday in Songs of
Innocence (1789) - when, for an hour, the sombre wastes of Portland stone , would be banked with
thousands of childish faces: Blakes flowers of London town.
The empty Cathedral had also become horribly dirty. It was so cold that Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
declared in the 1830s that to attend service was certain death, and that the sentences of his
sermons froze as they came out of his mouth, and thawed in the course of the following summer
making strange noises and unexpected assertions in various parts of the Church. The daily
services were cut off from the main body of the church by the massive organ screen (which was
removed in 1860). Ceremonial was mean and slovenly; the tiny choir, undisciplined, unrehearsed
and unpunctual, maundered on to a handful of worshippers.

Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-1898) seized his chance and fortune helped when the old
guard of the Cathedral Chapter, fossilized in this inertia, happened to die off all together within
three years. Gladstone extracted the scholar Richard Church in 1871 from his seclusion in a
country parish, and convinced him that his mission was to set St Pauls in order, as the great
English Cathedral in the nations eyes. Dean Churchs quietness was deceptive, and he succeeded
formidably during the brief period 'Jack' de la Mare spent trotting about Woolwich and to dame
school.
 (left) Dean Richard Church caricatured by Lib in Vanity Fair, 1886

The Cathedral Chapter of remarkable High Anglicans

became to Jack, at ten, his familiar daily acquaintances. He
became a connoisseur of their oratory and foibles. His first
earnings were a half-crown tip from an Archbishop
(Benson) for carrying his black satin train. Looking back, he
liked to think he might perhaps have trebled away, some
afternoon, to Cardinal Newman himself, who clinging to his
friendship with the Dean, would sometimes creep into the
nave, a troubled old exile, to listen wistfully to Evensong.

When de la Mare was twenty-five he wrote portrait sketches

of Dean Church and Canon Liddon as he had known them
9 years or so before. (Both died the year after he left
school.) The subject had remained for him a romantic one,
every detail sharp, and indeed would remain so all his life.
He noted every subtlety of appearance and mannerism of
Dean Church, ending:

'His glance was brief and tranquil and keen ... he had no acquaintance with pretence ... yet
I think pity and tenderness were so sharp within him as to be like sorrow ... His solitary
purity of heart, his candid and keen understanding, his zeal and his meekness, though you
might be afraid to meet his eye and stand abashed in his presence, these entered into your
memory like the bleak shining of a star.'

The authority of a man so unusual, who walked gently about his Cathedral, ruling all with a nod -
the permanent, acute, venerated conscience of the place, as Canon Scott-Holland described him
- gave Choir House (the Choir School) a perspective on to a stage of grander spiritual drama than
the common run of boarding schools usually affords for imaginative small boys. And this child,
brooding in his carved stall, with eye and heart attentive, was clearly not wasting his time there.
.
St Paul's Cathedral quire, circa 1865-1895. Source: Cornell University Library, A D White Architectural Photographs

Chancellor Liddon, caricatured in Vanity Fair, 1876, entitled 'High Church'

Canon Liddon, by the time Jack knew him, had lost the rapt beauty of his youth and had grown
plump, stooping, smooth-cheeked, grey and gentle. Jack, like everyone, remembered him best by
his voice:

'His speech was delicate, as if each word were finely chiselled ... voice mellow ... it rose
with a winning break almost to treble, it stirred the echoes like a bugle call ... Sweat dripped
 from his chin ... the hollow, silent spaces of St Pauls would ring and quaver the melody and
ardour of his eloquence, it seemed that a Seraph was crying out above the clouds.'

Gregory, the most powerful of the Canons at the Cathedral, appealed to boyish interest less
exaltedly: a bulky figure with bushy, irascible eyebrows and white hair flowing, afraid of nobody.
The Bishop of London was the formidable Frederick Temple (1821-1902, latterly Archbishop of
Canterbury, from 1896), but one day when he arrived two minutes late for a service he was due to
take and found it already in full swing, all he got from Gregory was: When the clock strikes, we
begin. It was Gregory who introduced the custom of performing Bachs St Matthew Passion in
Holy Week - the work which made the deepest impression on de la Mare of all he heard and sang
in his years there.
Part 2 - Life in the choir and choir school

St Paul's Cathedral interior showing the open view to the high altar, with the screen removed, reconstructed organ and extended choir
stalls - as Walter de la Mare would have known it. Note, also, the old pulpit,replaced by the current, more ornately-carved wooden pulpit
around 1963/4. Photo courtesy of St Paul's Cathedral website.
 Organists and Directors of Music at St Paul's Cathedral (above, from left):
Sir John Goss (1838-72), Sir John Stainer (1872-88), Sir George Clement Martin (1888-1916)

Under John Stainer, brought in by Canon Liddon to reform the music, and his successor George
Martin, the choir had become a great one. Otto Goldschmidt (1829-1907), the composer and
husband of 'Swedish Nightingale' opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887), considered it the second
choir in Europe after Vienna. The little school itself, founded in the Middle Ages, had not always
provided its boys with a regular life or much learning. In Elizabethan London the Children of Pauls
[links to thequire.wordpress.com, the Guild of the Companions of St Paul blog] were best known as
one of the citys regular dramatic companies, and in the early 19th century the almoner officially in
charge of them would supplement his salary by hiring out the boys to public evening concerts,
leaving them to find their way back after midnight as best they could. But in Jacks day the school
(as thoroughly reformed as the rest of the Cathedral) had regained a reputation for soundness and
care.

About 38 choirboys and

probationers studied there, under a
headmaster in Holy Orders with two
or three assistants. The organist
and choirmaster ruled the rest of
the boys curriculum. It was a tough
school, with long working hours and
only five weeks holiday a year. As
there was no second choir, a boy
could only snatch the end of
Christmas Day in his own home by
pelting off after service for a few
hours - if he could get there in the
time.
 (above) The inscription on the wall reads: Mihi autem absit gloriari nisi in cruce domini nostri Jesu Christi / Per quem mihi mundus
crucifixus est et ego mundo (But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world) - from St Paul's Letter to the Galatians 6:14

There was a good deal of bullying, alarming to this small gentle newcomer of 10 (some were only
8). The seniors ranged up to 16, and were not segregated by day. One of them took charge of
each new probationer, and bellowed and cuffed him into shape; and there was some official
fagging. Jack was there a term and a half before he became a full chorister: usually probation took
longer. The boys were of mixed class - anyone with a good voice might gain a place if not actually
in rags and off the streets. The entry tests officially demanded some knowledge of Latin
declensions, the catechism, the Bible and the Prayer Book, but what counted was a pleasing
quality and right production of the vocal scale.

It is a shock for most little boys to enter for the first time an exclusively masculine world, and Jacks
had been more than usually petticoat. His first letter shows the strain: a litany of homesickness too
desperately concentrated upon the world he had lost to describe much of this new one:

Choir House, Deans Court

June 10th p.m.

Dearest Mother

I feel very homesick will you or someone come and see me on Thursday
... I am not getting on very well with my lessons I am longing to see you or someone ... mind you write and tell
me all about home I have written to Mrs Hitchman have you seen anything of Uncle Colin I am longing to see
you ... I cant come home on Thursday because I shall have bad marks do someone come and see me ... you
dont know how I long for home I saw Herbert this afternoon ... I went under the Thames this evening with Mr
Russel it is ofly funny under there, you dont know how I long for home Mr Bathe is very nice hoping you will
excuse the things I have put under twice and wrong as I feel very confused and giddy
I must say goodbye
Believe me your darling Boy
 W. J. De la Mare
Mind you come or someone on Thursday

However, he was resilient and sociable and soon adapted himself. Choir House, in Deans Court,
tucked down the canyon of Carter Lane, a cramped alley just off Ludgate Hill, was a distinctive
building, begun a few years before (1874), in the elaborate Victorian-
Renaissance manner - grey brick with terracotta dressings, arabesques of plaster decoration - with
a large text from Galatians along the frieze. Above a shoulder-high parapet, a wire cage turned the
flat roof into the only playground then available.

(above) Source: Getty

In Jacks later years there, the school shared a playing-field at Willesden and would travel there by
Underground, shutting the windows against the sulphurous steam and passing the ball wildly from
hand to hand. Jack rather enjoyed games and, though not particularly good at them, won two
cricket bats. He remembered collaring a curate and bringing him down in a tackle when he was 15.
In later life he was no great enthusiast for physical exercise.

Choir House inside was a brownish, barish place - pleasantly, not grimly shabby; ecclesiastical but
not oppressively so. In old age, de la Mare said he could still wander about it all in memory - touch
the round brass door-handle and pass into the dark panelled dining room with two long side-tables
and high table laid across. Next to this was a fairly large class-room - shared in his time between
two forms - with high-up windows, and the old narrow benches and original oak locker doors from
an earlier school-house, in which choristers as far back as the 18th century had cut their names -
one of the Wesleys among them. A circular iron stair called the Well took Jack clattering upstairs to
the small prayer-room, where prayers were said morning and evening, and to the two long,
identical dormitories, junior and senior, one above the other, where between each bed a wooden
partition ran nearly to the ceiling, affording a little welcome privacy.

Above these dormitories the playground commanded a superb view south-west over roof-tops to St
Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe, and further, to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. On quiet nights
Big Ben boomed out - as near by, it seemed, as the bell of St Pauls itself, whose shoulder, over
the brief huddle of roofs on the other side of the playground, soared close above them, blazing
white when the sun shone.

But playground and dormitory could both hold their terrors. Three or four confirmed bullies used to
encourage the juniors to pick on one particular little victim. Jack was himself ill-treated: Oh yes, I
was bullied all right, he would say, but not as badly as some. One amusement was a gamed
called Sardines in which the small boys were piled criss-cross and the older ones competed to see
how many could be cleared at a jump from the lockers. But whatever his fears may have been,
Jack had spirit, and also soon took the sensible precaution of banding together with two other
boys, so that if one were set on, allies were always at hand.
In old age he thought he owed some of his never-failing pleasure of getting into bed - its bliss of
security - to the relief it had brought in these years from the terrors of the school day. Even so he
remembered a boy snatched back just as he was getting in between the sheets, to be handsomely
caned.

The seniors were not the only tyrants to fear. The headmaster was Dr Barff, a Tractarian who had
been chosen out by Cannon Liddon for his deep and simple piety and originality of mind. From a
boys-eye view Barff s piety was rigid, his temper not only strict but erratic. He took a morbid
pleasure in physical punishment and had a curious nature altogether, at once old-maidish and
tyrannical. He was expert at needlework and embroidery and kept a grey parrot that talked, but
with the boys he was hot-tempered, sarcastic and overbearing. His glance, as he shook hands in
the morning, seemed to one to hold you guilty until proved innocent. Punishment for the worst
offences was a public beating by the Dean, after which there would be a general souvenir-hunt for
scattered twig-ends, but Headmaster Barff beat much more often. Even after some wretched boys
long hours in school and stall had ended with weary impositions, he would think it well to round off
matters with a final birching.

The sole woman on the staff, the Matron, was scarcely more sympathetic than Barff. She fed the
boys well - some of the poorer ones better than in their own homes - for it was realised that a good
voice must be well nourished. But if anyone begged off a Cathedral service, a dose of castor oil,
whatever the symptoms, was the invariable sequel. After Jack had been at school two years, an
epidemic of scarlet fever closed the choir in September (1885), and from then on a regular summer
break was arranged.

The school day began with a cold-water wash. Then came prayers at 7.30 with one invariable
hymn, unaccompanied, Now that the daylight fills the skies - whether it did or not:

Now that the daylight fills the sky,

We lift our hearts to God on high,
That He, in all we do or say,
Would keep us free from harm today.

May He restrain our tongues from strife,

And shield from angers din our life,
And guard with watchful care our eyes
From earths absorbing vanities.

O may our inmost hearts be pure,

From thoughts of folly kept secure,
And pride of sinful flesh subdued
Through sparing use of daily food.

So we, when this days work is oer,

And shades of night return once more,
Our path of trial safely trod,
Shall give the glory to our God.

All praise to God the Father be,

 All praise, eternal Son, to Thee,
Whom with the Spirit we adore
Forever and forevermore.

[Words attributed to Ambrosius (St Ambrose of Milan), Iam lucis orto sidere, translated from Latin to English by John M
Neale in the Hymnal Noted, 1852. Usually sung to the tune Warrington (1784) by Ralph Harrison (1748-1810)]

Then on with boots and away, whatever the weather, to the Embankment, as far as Waterloo
Bridge, whose granite each boy must kick before doubling back to breakfast.

'The Embankment' by John Scorrer O'Connor (1874) - photo by Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Pea-soup fogs (common when every grate burnt coal at only twenty shillings a ton) allowed the
bolder spirits a little straying from the crocodile. Somewhere along these walks Jack saw a face
whose beauty he never forgot, a ragged girl picking over a dust-bin where there was little enough
to pick.
 The Embankment (circa 1880)

It occurred to him later that vagrant poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907) might well have been
among those wretched figures he used so often to pass wrapped in their newspapers and inert on
the Embankment benches. One memory he mentioned in a late poem, The Jacket, was of a
suicides corpse towed behind a police boat, the body swollen, the head lolling out of the water.
Subdued, the boys filed back to the breakfast they no longer wanted.

Lessons began at nine, broken off for Cathedral Mattins (including all the psalms allotted and twice
in the week the Litany as well). After a brief lunch-break they were rehearsed for an hour, with
unremitting scales and solfeggi, till Evensong at 3.45pm. Then came their one hour of freedom.
Then 6 oclock tea, followed by lessons and preparation until the smaller boys were released to
bed after a roll-call at nine. Sunday, naturally, was no leisure day; full choral eucharist, following
directly on a full choral mattins (the sermon often an hour long), kept them in the Cathedral
continuously till one oclock. Ordination services could last four hours apiece.
 St Paul's Cathedral chorister John Pritchard, aged 11 in 1897. Note the upturned mortar-board to his side.

Yet, oddly, de la Mare does not seem to have found the long sessions in the Cathedral unbearably
tedious. He certainly responded to the fine ceremonial, and in those days of St Pauls glory any
small boy privileged to wear the distinctive mortar-board with upsticking tuft could feel himself a
personage of genuine importance in the great world.
Part 3 - Fun half-days out and discovery that poetry is the communication of truth

Evening on Ludgate Hill (1887) oil painting by John O'Connor.

Jack would love in later years to revisit the Cathedral, to sit in the churchyard, or take a friend in to
see Donnes effigy. The dying Dean had sat for sculptor Nicholas Stone, dressed dramatically in
his frill-topped shroud. In the little boy, that striking memento mori helped form the characteristic
bent of his mind.
 Effigy of John Donne, 1631, in St Paul's Cathedral

Long hours of reverie in such surroundings must have done much to confirm for life his urgent,
innate presentiment that human life took meaning from some vast, obscure, unignorable context.
This was the mystery which these brooding stones arched over him expressly to illustrate.

St Pauls affected not only his spiritual stance and the temper of his imagination. It very likely
supplied also some actual materials: oddities of humankind, hag-ridden old cranks, eccentric
vergers - some elements of the grandeur of the Cathedral in de la Mare's supernatural story All
Hallows (listen to it read here by Richard E. Grant); also the germ perhaps of the carved angel in
his ghostly poem The Trumpet, for the heights of the Grinling Gibbons organ case (by his time
divided in two and placed along each end of the choir stalls) were peopled with beautiful,
remote-eyed angel trumpeters.

One might have expected that baroque would be a style quite

antipathetic to so gothic a fantasy as de la Mares; yet in fact the
architecture of St Pauls did appeal profoundly to him: perhaps
because, in Wrens serene conception, baroque sheds its superbia
and the unearthly pierces in - mystery coming foremost by means
of the dome. Wrens majestic blue bubble floating over London was
for de la Mare supremely important, an icon - the centre, always, of
London - now misty with November fog, now sun-becalmed with
the radiance of Spring.

Jacks mother shared all his romantic feeling for the place, and
revelled in the ritual, colour, drama so long denied her. She had
discovered her spiritual home, and as often as she could she would
make the long journey from Forest Hill to bring Poppy and the other
children to attend Evensong.
 John Colet was Dean of St Paul's from 1505 to 1519

By his own account, personal religious faith (as distinct from a sense of the numinous) meant
something real enough to de la Mare in these years. He would look back later with a passionate
sense of deprivation to the trust in divine loving-kindness and the poignant sense of grace that he
had felt as a chorister. Yet he did once advise a young couple against a choir education for their
son if they wanted him to grow up a believer. The preaching, except as a stirring histrionic
performance, was always a trial, and it crystallized very early his lifelong hatred of dogma. Yet
boys - acute detectives of humbug - respond deeply to the spiritual atmosphere a real sincerity will
generate, even if they remain deaf to the arguments advanced; and St Pauls in that fervent era
was a place of living conviction. A sacred awe hung murmuring, after the surge of worship led by
the boys voices, in that curious still roar or loud whisper, as it was described in Dean Colets day,
which was the nearest the Cathedrals echoes ever came to silence.

To compensate for the rigours, treats, when they came, were satisfactory enough. On Sundays the
four canons and eight minor canons resident in Amen Court took turns to invite the boys in pairs
round to breakfast. There were hot sausages and eggs. Archdeacon Sinclair would oblige by
inserting a whole egg into his mouth; Gregory would lift his beard by the tip to touch his ferocious
eyebrows. After lunch Col. Vivian Majendie, Chief Inspector of Explosives, who had attached
himself to the school as a kind of universal godfather, came regularly to tell them a story, standing
with his back to the lockers. He was by far the most dashing figure in their world - a refreshing
change from the clergy with his military bearing, charming manner, and repertoire of dangerous
exploits. He brought round a bomb, defused, for the boys to inspect. Fenians had left it in Charing
Cross station, disguised ingeniously as a clock. He gave them scientific lectures illustrated with
mild but pleasing explosions, and would read aloud the latest number of the Strand Magazine in
which the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were then appearing. He also read them Qs Dead
Mans Rock, and Treasure Island, which had just appeared.

De la Mare himself came to hold that the influence of such boyhood reading is a tenuous affair.
Those very first books at home - Gullivers Travels and the Arabian Nights counted in his
development more than did most of his schoolboy reading, which consisted largely of the usual
adventure stories: Henty, Kingsley, Marryat, Jules Verne, Ainsworth and whatever penny bloods
the boys could scrounge. He also delighted in Baron Munchhausen.
Imagination, it would seem, went partly underground for a stage; he showed no great liking for
poetry and no gift yet for it himself. Poes fiction was certainly a formative influence, and he began
early to learn from him by imitation, trying out in adolescence a mystery tale (unfinished) involving
a cryptogram. Aged about twelve, he also got hold of some dumpy little book in a flimsy pink cloth
binding, which so shocked him with its sexual revelations that he tried
to burn it, afraid to have it discovered in his possession. (He
remembered it as The Mysteries of Paris, but that is likely to be a
slip of memory, for this run-of-the-mill historical romance by Eugene
Sue (1804-57) could scarcely alarm the most prudish soul.) Whatever
the book really was, it refused to burn. In the school grate it merely
charred, do what he would, so he fished it out and dropped it in the
Thames.

Certainly nothing before Choir House had prepared de la Mare for

schoolboy smut. He referred once in strong terms to what a hideous
woe lewd company at its first onset can be. But the lewdness
mentioned concerns birth facts. There is nothing, no evidence either
way, whether homosexuality also was concerned. Long afterwards
he recalled the actual asphalted City spot on which another boy confided to him some fact of
obstetrics, and the very expression on his flushed, mock-innocent face ... He found me ignorant ...
and left me confused ... Evidently he was neither a prig nor at all uninterested. He had, by
choir-school days, long pondered for himself the sexual passages in the Old Testament, finding
them (so he recalled) perfectly natural and acceptable.

The Royal Aquarium, c. 1876

On their Thursday half-holiday, if they were not going home, the boys were accompanied by a
master to a lively range of entertainments. Even a matinee at a Music Hall or the Royal Aquarium
at Westminster (opened in 1876, demolished in 1903) were considered permissible. The Aquarium
[on the site where the Methodist Central Hall now stands] was a large building running an almost
continuous variety performance from eleven in the morning till eleven at night: Blondin and Ella
Zuila wheeling little Lulu on the tightrope, Professor Kennedy the Mesmerist calling for volunteers,
a Samson (once there were two, rival and embittered), Succi who fasted forty days, Paula with her
crocodiles and snakes. A high diver, tied up in a sack, plunged from the roof into a small tank
where he released himself under water, a lady was shot from a gun, and there were performing
fleas.

Jack revelled in such marvels; his pronounced

interest in them, persisting throughout his work,
probably originated in these half-holidays. The
choirboys also sampled the Lord Mayors Show,
Buffalo Bill Cody and his Indians, Thomas
German Reeds Entertainment at St Georges Hall
(two one-act plays, with a good orchestra) and
Barnums Wild Beast Show. This comprised five
circus performances running simultaneously, with
Siamese Twins, Giant, Fat Boy, Tattooed Lady,
and Dwarf. The last caught Jacks speculative eye
and his pity, sowing the seed of his Memoirs of a
Midget.

The Cathedral itself provided some sideshows. Jack caught sight of

Gladstone quite often, calling on his friends in the Chapter. Once,
from the depths of a tiny brougham coming out of Charing Cross
Station, he felt himself transfixed by his austere stare, from behind
the hooked, budgerigar nose - not, the boy thought, with approval.
To one junior at Choir House Jack seemed at this age to have been
full of fun, always up to larks, though not of the sort that got him into
trouble. And kind, too: Come downstairs, Yarrow, and lets have a
fight, he suggested but, seeing the little boys alarm, at once broke
off to explain that he was joking. To his fellows he seemed happy,
bold, one who enjoyed choir life - an affectionate, squareset, lively
companion. But one photograph in the attitude characteristic of his
manhood days, his chin propped between first and second finger,
suggests something of the thinker within. Another, at the top of this
article (though official, perhaps marking his promotion to full chorister) shows a more sensitive
and delicate child.

His end-of-term reports, some of them kept all his life, were seldom complimentary, except about
conduct. Typical comments were: Low average, work latterly disappointing, or still at times very
unsatisfactory. Even by 1887, when he was fourteen and had been at St Pauls four years, he
shows a want of general information for a boy so high in the school. Probably those queer
nuggets of out-of-the-way fact (the kind one would expect to find in Thomas Browne) which he
already delighted to hoard up, did not rank with schoolmasters as general information.

As to Classics, the staple fare - the Greek and Roman vision, the great statements of achieved
order - they were not for him. His northerly, crepuscular, ramifying intuitions were wholly Romantic.
The Classical nymphs and divinities were so much marble to him; he could find no instinctive way
into the imaginative source from which they had sprung. Beside the intimate vitality of the elves
and fairies, giants and goblins of northern Europe, they seemed to him null. If he made any
exception it was for the Naiad, or water nymph, a recurrent symbol in his work for Beauty the
tantaliser, the vision that evades. But even she turns up in a guise much nearer to a Hans
Anderson creature, or to an Undine, than to the Greek spirit; and such few other nymphs as his
poetry introduces are perfunctory stock properties.

He did once say he had taken a particular pleasure in Latin verse while at St Pauls, but of all
kinds of poetry the classical seems to have meant least to him throughout life. (In any case, during
his early years at school he said that he came to hate all poetry wholesale, from the odious tedium
of having verse to write out in punishment as lines.)

All the same what startled him at fourteen into realising with a vital shock that poetry is the
communication of truth - a moment so crucial he referred to it as conversion of the mind - was not
something from Keats or Coleridge but came as a thunderbolt, while he was dismally trying to
construe a few lines of the Iliad. As he stammered out And Achilles ... went out ... black as ...
night, insight flashed upon him: "Why that means black as NIGHT." Looking back he wrote: It was
a revelation thus suddenly to have become aware that a fine poem means every single syllable
and iota of what it says. As may the Creation itself. The experience made such an impact that
poetry reawoke in him, never again to be less than the pole of his spiritual compass.

For the rest, music, it seems, was the only art that made early appeal. The Bach aria that remained
his favourite, Have mercy Lord on me (Erbarme dich), overwhelmed him from the very first time
he heard it. No child, he thought, could fail to be moved by its beauty, whether he had musical
knowledge or not. Apart from any associations, he wrote, I loved it then, I love it now. It seems to
me to be a flawless revelation of the human heart and spirit and perhaps the most exquisite
fragment in that supreme achievement, the St Matthew Passion. Bach, Mozart and Handel
became his favourite composers from choir days on, and Brahms he also learned to love at St
Pauls, where the Requiem was part of the repertoire. But musically he was a no better than
average performer and never sang solo. His ear was far from faultless; when leader of the Decani
side he realised one day that they were off-pitch and passed the word along to sing sharp - so
disastrously (for it should have been flat) that the organist had to call a halt.
Brian Penry Bernard Calkin, 1897-1918, contemporary chorister of Walter de la Mare
at St Paul's Cathedral, killed in the Great War.

Walter ('Jock') de la Mare, chorister of St Paul's Cathedral, 1883-1889.

Part 4 - Befriended and inspired by Canon Scott-Holland

The person who had far the greatest influence on Walter 'Jack' de la Mare at St Pauls was the
brilliant, dynamic and widely-loved Canon Henry Scott-Holland, appointed after Jacks first year.
He was 37 and very boyish himself. Once a favourite pupil of William Cory [at Eton], Scott-Holland
shared, it seems, that outstanding teachers gift for arousing the wits and affection of boys.

Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918

Passionately devout, but never solemn, he would grin openly across at the choirboys if anything
ridiculous struck him in a service. He was one of the editors of the English Hymnal and took an
ardent interest in the singing. His hilarity, gusts of enthusiasm, love of games and sports, and
particular pleasure in swimming where the currents were dangerous all made him popular. One
didnt mind being ignorant or stupid in his company, de la Mare wrote, indeed one stopped being
so! Also I can recall his breakfast sausages, certain oyster pates at his Christmas Party, and his
reading me Browning. He used to run up the western steps of the Cathedral, two (or was it three)
at a time in a diagonal bee-line ... and wasted no love on Archdeacon Sinclair who wore scent.
Pf, he cried one day on entering the vestry, that Charwoman again!

For the little dark boy with the big head who got poor reports, but was so full of interests and so
responsive, Scott-Holland had a specially protective affection. Jack pelted him with questions, and
took to him the first poem he could remember attempting. The theme, he recalled, was Pharaohs
rout at the Red Sea, in anapaests, I fancy. I confided the MS to a bosom friend. Canon Henry
Scott-Holland - a friend to whom a boy could confide all but anything either in head or his heart.
That mercurial, that most original countenance! He read it and remarked with an amiable twinkle in
the alertest of human eyes that the subject was a familiar one ... I was a little daunted by this
tepidity, but quickly recovered. That virus is not so easily sterilized. Scott-Holland was known for a
certain ruthless incorruptibility of judgment, and his praise for later verses, when it did come, was
the more valued.
His letters to the fifteen-year-old de la Mare would begin My little son or My own dearest Jack.
Today such tenderness even between men, let alone from man to boy, would instantly be suspect:
the Victorians were less inhibited and would have found us crude. Our trumpeted sexual liberation
seems to have substituted a new set of hang-ups, equally hobbling to the imagination, and to truth
to life, though it is unfashionable for the biographer to say so.

Even so, there was always a recognised risk in such attachments, and they had cost William
Johnson Cory his Masters career at Eton. Scott-Hollands own conduct was irreproachable, but his
lack of caution or of any self-consciousness let him in for imputations at least once. (They were
afterwards withdrawn.)

Scott-Holland not only entertained Jack at No. 1 Amen Court, but took him home in the holidays ...
So Jack came to know Wimbledon Common from Scott-Hollands Italianate villa, a
theatrical-looking house at its edge, with a tower, and a dragon for weathervane. The Common (for
several years probably the loveliest wild open country he ever saw) became a treasure of de la
Mares boyhood, to which his early stories instinctively homed. He made it the setting of no less
than three of these, and of that other, mentioned earlier, with a house called The Grange in it, and
never finished - all this in a lifework notably sparse in topographic references.

(left) Wimbledon Common in 1888

When he was living as a young man

in Wandsworth, he would take his
sweetheart, whenever he could, not
only to walk on nearby Wandsworth
and Clapham Commons - tame
places by comparison - but right
across London to revisit Wimbledon.
Here again was edge-country:
open, rolling, heathy slopes, crested
sometimes with a small wood of firs
and bracken - green dells,
yellow-hammers calling, a solitary
pond and a may-tree here and there
- now and then a cornfield or a stretch of gleaming grass, but always, along the border, the
intermittent twinkle of windows: not the windows of cottages of the countryside, but of well-to-do
villas, the urban streets never very far behind them.

Judging by his letters, Jack seemed to Scott-Holland a delicate, vulnerable, gifted little boy. Even
allowing for the difference of the paternal Victorian style, Jack seems to have been fixed in his
minds eye as an innocent, and one only too likely to get snuffed out by lack of encouragement.
Nevertheless Scott-Hollands affection was saved from sentimentality by something perspicacious
and intellectually demanding which would make him later on a wise critic, once he had got over the
jolt of finding the child grown into a moody, complex, highly-strung adult.

Probably even now, when his voice was about to break, there was much more of child than
adolescent about Jack to any elders eye. There certainly stuck in Scott-Hollands memory a wistful
expression and pale face that Jacks schoolfellows do not seem to have noticed. Children are our
daylight, Scott-Holland held; we do not get wiser but stupider. The whole life ahead of this child
he had befriended was to be spent eloquently preaching on that text and the turn of phrase itself
might well be de la Mares own.
Part 5 - Jack's voice breaks and the Choristers' Journal is founded.

After his third year at St Pauls there was a welcome change of headmaster. The Rev. William
Russell, Barff's second-in-command, saintly, bearded and delightful, came one morning into the
schoolroom armed as usual with his unfolded umbrella, and announced his promotion.
We crowded round him; we cheered; someone cheeked him; he laughed; and never have I heard
laughter merrier than his. Under Russell the rigours of Choir House relaxed considerably. He
would read stories aloud to the boys, and when he talked of anything he had keenly in mind or at
heart he would bend himself almost double in his chair; a light came into his blue eyes; he would
tug at his beard, and move his long lean fingers with nervous enthusiasm.

He opened Jacks mind to the English poets, even kindled a keenness for algebra and theorems,
made riders a joy, and Latin verse almost a hobby. He had a light hand with impositions too and
once gave Jack, whose punctuation was never strong, a hundred full stops.

It was Russell who prepared Jack for confirmation. The school custom was for candidates to go to
the headmaster for absolution the day before they were confirmed, and Yarrow (that younger boy
in whose memory Jack shone with such affection) went up with him to knock on the prayer-room
door. After their shriving, Russell talked to them, then blessed them as they knelt side by side,
laying his hands on their heads. Yarrow remembered that they were both much moved. Outside
afterwards on the stairs Jack, smiling, but with nothing said, put his own hand on Yarrows head
briefly, before the school world closed round them again.

The Midget specially mentions her own confirmation in her memoirs, and since the childhood of
this alter ego includes so many touches from Jacks own, one can read her reaction as his: The
experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart, but it made me for a time a little
self-conscious of both my virtue and my sins.

(left) Painter Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

Towards the end of Jacks schooldays the British

painter Holman Hunt came one day to sketch the
boys at their afternoon practice; he wanted to make
studies of their open mouths for his painting May
Morning on Magdalen Tower ( below). He invited the
boys to see the finished picture when it went on
exhibition, but de la Mare had left the school by then.
The figures of the men in the picture are identifiable
portraits, but Holman Hunt himself wrote of the boys
faces: It was impossible for me to have the
opportunity of painting from any of them; and though
Jack fancied that one of the dark choristers in the
picture was very like himself, it is unlikely that the
painter had intended it.
Not long after came the spring day in 1889 when Jack himself heard what was left of an indifferent
voice crack in the middle of that favourite aria from the Bach Passion music. He glanced up
abashed at Sir George Martin, who was conducting. Their glances met, and Martin just perceptibly
shook his head. Jack stopped singing; his choir days were over.

(left) Sir George Martin, Organist of St Paul's Cathedral, London, 1888-1916

Next terms report, under Usefulness, put tersely: Voice gone.

The six years in the choir had meant a great deal to him. He held
singing to be good both for heart and body ... 'Music, even if not
very closely attended to, is on this earth what the soul can
unwittingly breathe, to its infinite benefit.

He was by now near the top of the school, hard-working and

dependable, responsible for the younger choristers, though Martin
reported: He does not appear to have that influence over the boys
which is so necessary in his position. In fact Jack was not
possessed of the upper-class English schoolboy virtue of
leadership. He disliked having to give orders, detested the
masterful in man or woman, and never achieved the presence of natural authority. All the same
he successfully insisted on clean hands among his fags, for he was already fastidious and
beginning to be something of a dandy.

At Michaelmas 1889, his final term, when he was 16 and Senior Boy, the idea came to him and
Bouquet, the boy who had sat next to him in choir, to found a Choristers Journal. Russell gave
them every encouragement, though he demurred at the title journal. In fact they began with a
weekly which soon slackened to a fortnightly. Even so the editors found that it swallowed all their
free time. They wrote most of each number between them, organised competitions, scoured
encyclopaedias for replies to queries and for the series called Great Little Facts.

[insert photo of Choristers' Journal]

They jellygraphed the first issues in the boot room, where they also consumed a roast pheasant
which Colonel Majendie contributed to cheer them on. First issued at a penny, the Journal
consisted of six sheets closely impurpled on both sides. It was a great success. Russell mused in
his preface: Who knows that this little world may not be nourishing in it an incipient Sir Walter
Scott or a Lord Macaulay.

In fact Jacks own contributions do not suggest literary genius or even particular promise. They
include Powder Monkey Bob (a childish sailors yarn) and A Moonlight Skate (a thriller). He was
probably also the author of an equally childish ghost story, A Race for Life, in which the narrator is
pursued by a party of spectral Druids unrelentlessly. The whole lively and naive production is
worlds away from the sophisticated sixth form of a public school.

In later life de la Mare remained loyal to his own innocent, rough, tough, musically expert
education, and never much held with the public-school mystique. He watched his grandsons go to
Eton with some regret; he thought that public school had a stultifying effect on the imagination, and
that the only real education a boy of character gets anyway he gets for himself -and probably in his
leisure hours.

St Paul's, Blackfriars Bridge and Station, as Walter 'Jack' de la Mare would have known it, in the 1880s. Library of Congress.
All through the summer of 1889 he was expecting (after finishing at St Paul's) to join his brother
Bert in the Bank of England, and a December entry in his diary-notebook wonders whether he will
be going there before the month is out. But something intervened, and the Bank plan was
abandoned. We do not know why, and when Jack went into Headmaster Russells study to say
goodbye at Christmas he knew nothing of his next step: He talked to me: I felt that things had
suddenly become a little different - the World was looming round the corner. He gave me the
brown leather Bible, embossed with its cross-swords, and his own personal parting-present, an
inkstand. It was not, I think, intended in any way as a portent or an omen. But we should both of us
perhaps have felt many misgivings if we could have foreseen how many times its cut-glass bottle
was to be filled and to be emptied again in the years that were to follow.

Read more about 'Jack' at the Walter de la Mare Society and Poetry Foundation.

This blog post is an extract from Chapter 2 (Schooldays) of The Life of Walter de la Mare, by Theresa Whistler.
Used by permission of Duckworth Publishers, 30 Calvin Street, London E1 6NW (www.ducknet.co.uk or +44 (0)20 7490
7300). Now out of print, used copies may be obtainable via Amazon (UK).
Walter de la Mare was a man of letters and is now well known as one of Britain's leading poets and
novelists of the 20th century, writing for both adults and children. He was also a literary critic,
serving as the main critic on the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for many years. He died in 1956,
aged 83.
Part 6: The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

Source: https://alliread.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/walter-de-la-mare-a-fine-english-all-rounder

Is there anybody there? said the Traveller, That goes down to the empty hall,
Knocking on the moonlit door; Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses By the lonely Travellers call.
Of the forests ferny floor: And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
And a bird flew up out of the turret, Their stillness answering his cry,
Above the Travellers head: While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
And he smote upon the door again a second time; Neath the starred and leafy sky;
Is there anybody there? he said. For he suddenly smote on the door, even
But no one descended to the Traveller; Louder, and lifted his head:
No head from the leaf-fringed sill Tell them I came, and no one answered,
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, That I kept my word, he said.
Where he stood perplexed and still. Never the least stir made the listeners,
But only a host of phantom listeners Though every word he spake
That dwelt in the lone house then Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight still house
To that voice from the world of men: From the one man left awake:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
dark stair, And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
The Light of the World by Holman Hunt, in the North Transept chapel of St Paul's Cathedral
Part 7: More online sources of works by Walter de la Mare

from: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1108
Best Stories (includes 'All Hallows')
Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems

Memoirs of a Midget (Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Memoirs-Midget-Walter-Mare/1846590663)

Peacock Pie, a book of rhymes (Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peacock-Pie-Rhymes-Childrens-Classics/dp/0571313892/)