John Masefield, the well-loved poet, was born in 1878, and he first appears in public records on the census return for 1881; he is only two at the time, but there he is recorded with his mother Caroline who was born in 1859, and his father George who was a solicitor. John has one sister and two brothers, Frances, George and Reginald, good solid Victorian names, names which now are back in fashion! All the family were born in Ledbury, in Herefordshire, except Caroline who came from nearby Great Comberton in Worcestershire. .The family are helped by three servants, all local women.
Ten years later, tragedy has struck the family; John is now in a boarding school with boys from all over the country, and all over the world, including Scotland, Ireland, Canada, India and Australia. His eleven year old brother George was also in a boarding school, but in Eastbourne in Sussex.His brother Reginald, younger brother Charles and sister Caroline were staying with their Uncle William Masefield and his wife Katherine, as well as a governess, called Charlotte Mansfield. The reason the family were split and divided was tragic; their mother died giving birth to baby Caroline, and their father died not long after following a total mental collapse.
The next time John can be found in census records is 1911; here his situation is much happier. he has married Constance from Cushendun in Northern Ireland. It’s a pretty little village by the sea, and next time I visit I will think of Constance. in 1911, John is recorded as being a writer and he and Constance have two children, Isabel Judith and Lewis Crommelin; Lewis’s second name was his mother’s maiden name.
John lived to a grand old age, so I hope his later life was happier than his early years.
Sonnet XIV
What is this atom which contains the whole,
This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange,
This, which imagined God and is the soul,
The steady star persisting amid change?
What waste, that smallness of such power should need
Such clumsy tools so easy to destroy,
Such wasteful servants difficult to feed,
Such indirect dark avenues to joy.
Why, if its business is not mainly earth,
Should it demand such heavy chains to sense?
A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth,
A quicker hand to act intelligence.
An earthly thing were better like the rose
At peace with clay from which its beauty grows.
Lois Elsden 