Melville Davisson Post's headstone at the Elkview cemetery, Clarksburg, West Virginia. Image by Katina Peters.

Yesterday I was researching a short piece on Melville Davisson Post, the magazine short story writer who created Uncle Abner, a Jeffersonian-era detective from the backwoods of what was then Virginia. For a time at the start of the twentieth century Post was apparently the best-paid magazine short story writer in the United States. His first creation, a crooked lawyer named Randolph Mason, drew criticism because many people felt his techniques for evading justice would give the criminal fraternity ideas. In fact Post, who started out as a lawyer, used the Randolph Mason stories to expose loopholes in the law. Here are a few examples of his stories.

So far so good I thought, but I hit problems when I tried to establish and verify Post’s birth and death dates. My first port of call was Wikipedia, which claimed he was born on April 19, 1869 and died on June 23, 1930. Of course you can’t stop with Wikipedia, so I looked at several other sources, including Webster’s Biographical Dictionary (1995 edition), the venerable Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler (1976), which I bought in a book shop in Santa Rosa, California a few years ago, and Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure (1941), which gives brief biographies of detective fiction writers. They disagreed. Webster’s claims he lived from 1871-1930, Steinbrunner and Penzler picked 1869-1930, while Haycraft, whose book was published only 11 years after Post’s death, says 1871-1930. Finally, I looked at Find a Grave, an excellent website which helps you do exactly that. Find a Grave listed 1871 as his birth year.

After all that I was thoroughly puzzled. I asked on Twitter to see if anyone had any ideas, but still couldn’t get confirmation. In the end I resorted to emailing Katina Peters, who lives in West Virginia and provides photographs of headstones to people researching the whereabouts of their ancestors through Find a Grave. She very kindly sent me two links to pages at http://wvculture.org which states its mission “is to identify, preserve, protect, promote, and present the ideas, arts, and artifacts of West Virginia’s heritage, building pride in our past accomplishments and confidence in our future”. It carries free online copies of birth and death records for West Virginia residents, including Melville Davisson Post. And here they are:

Born April 19, 1869
Died June 23, 1930

Note that the death certificate claims he was born in 1871; that’s probably where the error crept in. This kind of discrepancy is surprisingly common in official records and after years of working on this kind of thing I have come to the conclusion that a great deal of what we believe to be true about the past is actually invented. Curiously many sources claim Post died after falling from a horse, but whether he had a fall or not, he also had some kind of cirrhosis which his doctor cited as the primary cause of death.

Find a Grave will be updated.

Edit July 9, 2009: Image of headstone added.

A College Boy adds quite a few new snippets of information to the early Chandler biography as well as looking at his writing from a Dulwich point of view. The college’s ledger of Entrance and Tuition Fees, for example, apparently shows that in 1900, when he enrolled at the college having just arrived in England, Chandler lived at Whitefield Lodge, 77 Alleyn Park; he and his mother are later listed in the 1901 census as living at Mount Cyra, 110 Auckland Road, Upper Norwood. As Calista Lucy points out, there is no blue plaque: there should be. There is also information about the books he borrowed from the library–Thackeray, Lamb, and Mark Twain feature–and the news that Chandler returned to Dulwich as a substitute teacher in 1910, from the start of the Michaelmas term that year through to July 1911. This was the period in which his literary ambitions were foundering through lack of money. The job apparently paid him a total of £53 6s, around a sixth of a regular Dulwich College master’s salary at the time.

Chandler the teacher is a tantalising prospect. He was probably a charismatic figure in the classroom, but I suspect there was a lot of ‘telling’ in his teaching style. He was helped into the teaching job by an old master of his, Henry ‘Teddy’ Hose (1876-1967), with whom he kept up a correspondence and friendship that included sending monthly food parcels in the years when food was rationed after World War II. He also did this for another ‘Old Alleynian’, McCulloch Christison.

Besides this kind of information, where the pamphlet is also interesting is in it’s highly suggestive speculations about the influence of the school on Chandler’s later life. For example it seems that in 1903 G.F. Watts’s painting of Sir Galahad (left) was hanging in the school library during Chandler’s time there. It also turns out that the cornflower is the school flower and Lucy makes a link here with the cornflower in the lapel of Lindsay Marriott in Farewell, My Lovely, and Eileen Wade’s cornflower blue eyes–’a rare colour’–in The Long Good-Bye.

These connections might seem tenuous at face value, but Chandler stayed in contact with several people from the school and clearly saw his time there as a major influence on his later life. Lucy notes that Bill Townend, another Dulwich old boy, met Chandler in San Francisco in 1913 and found he was wearing a straw ‘boater’ with the cornflower blue Dulwich ribbon round the brim. This corroborates other evidence that Chandler’s first place of residence in California was the Bay Area, rather than the environs of Los Angeles. For example, Chandler’s mother Florence seems to be listed in a 1912 passenger manifest of the SS Merion with a final US destination of ‘Berkeley, San Francisco’.

More on the discrepancies in Chandler’s early biography here, and on Loren Latker’s Shamus Town site.

“The Olympics started the next day on 08. 08. 08. I’ll never forget that. I watched most of it,” he says. But his enforced bout of TV watching proved cathartic.“I listened to all these stories about sportsmen who get big knock-backs but they believe in what they have and come back,” he explains.

He and his brother Ajmail decided to give things another go and bought much of Cains from Pricewaterhouse- Coopers, its administrator, later in the summer.

Today the group is smaller and humbler than it was. It has just nine pubs and fewer staff. A number of old customers are gone, but many have stood by the company and there are new ones too. Turnover this year should be £30m, just over half of what it was but still a sizeable amount.

Here’s the link to the Telegraph piece again. And speaking of marketing pitches, there’s a lot more about Cains and its fascinating 160-year history in my book Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint.

I spent part of last week in Oslo and discovered that Norway is arguably the shed capital of the world. I’ve posted two sets of photographs on my photoblog, Ingrahap, of waterside huts from around Oslo Fjord here and here. Shed week starts on July 6th this year. Go and vote for your shed of the year, right here. I’m backing Bletchley Park hut 6.

Of all the whales in literature, among the most famous is Moby Dick described by Herman Melville:

“Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight”.

Melville’s story is one of drama and grim portent, but far more extraordinary is the story of the whale itself. For the manner in which the whale has evolved is among the finest exemplars of the changes evolution can bring to bear upon life on Earth.

In Our Time ‘The Whale’

Malcolm Lowry described Liverpool as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’. Born on the Wirral side of the river Mersey, Lowry’s relationship to the Merseyside of his youth informs all of his writing and Liverpool itself continued to hold tremendous significance for him, even though he never returned.

The book includes writing by Gordon Bowker, Ailsa Cox,  Colin Dilnot, Annick Drösdal-Levillain, Michele Gemelos, Mark Goodall, Ian McMillan, Nicholas Murray, Cian Quayle, Alberto Rebollo, Robert Sheppard and Michael Turner.

And there’s more. Helen Tookey is also running a short course about Lowry and his work at the University of Liverpool in September and October. The course is open to everyone. Details will be available from the department of Continuing Education later in the summer.

For information about the book, visit the publisher’s page.

Information about Lowry events in Liverpool is available from The Bluecoat.

Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn’t shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds (”so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, “flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot’s dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.

[Link (pdf)]

Cowlick

There are some experiences so significant it seems wrong to speak of them even if you are four years old and can’t stop talking. We have a secret code for Barnhill, the house on the island of Jura where we stayed for a week in the wet summer of 2008. We call it ‘Cowlick’ because while we were there the car we left by the roadside miles away became an impromptu scratching post and salt lick for a herd of cows. The code was devised by our daughter because hearing the name of the place itself, and not being there any more, made her feel sad.

Sixty years before, in 1948, George Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four at Barnhill. It is a good-sized farmhouse four miles from a road and about a mile from its nearest neighbour. It probably ranks among the most isolated dwellings in the British isles. In the summer, swallows nest illegally under the eaves and sea eagles balance above the bay. As a house Barnhill is no great beauty in itself, but it fits the place perfectly, like a white rock exposed in the landscape by thousands of years of weather.

Orwell’s move to Barnhill in 1946 was partly to do with his health. As it turned out later he was tubercular and the air quality in London in the 1940s was atrocious and making him ill. But the year he chose to move to Jura happened to include one of Britain’s hardest winters. He was also intending to farm the land and establish a degree of self-sufficiency. Living on Jura would put him out of reach of the government spooks he believed were watching him and it was also far enough from London, he thought, to escape the worst effects of an atom bomb. But for the most part he was seeking an escape from the distractions of the city. He wanted to write his novel away from all the noise and the busy-ness of his work as a journalist.

Despite its isolation Barnhill now draws a surprising number of day trippers. Orwell knew that the best spies are recruited from friends and neighbours and he would probably not have been surprised to find that many of Barnhill’s visitors are prepared to slip through the closed gate into the garden to peer in at the windows, invading the private spaces of the house in their search for something of him. In fact not much remains of Orwell at Barnhill now. The house looks much the same from the outside, though it is better maintained than in Orwell’s day. There are traces of the work he did in cultivating the garden: fragments of iron fencing, the faint ghost of a path to the front door, a solitary azalea. Inside it is much more comfortable than he would have remembered.

Writers’ houses are big business now of course. The Beatrix Potter industry, centred on her farmhouse, Hill Top, brings thousands of tourists to the Lake District. Visitors swarm over the houses of Dickens and Wordsworth, Ruskin, James and Woolf, to name only a few. In an age when most people can read and write perhaps they want to know what it is that makes this writer’s work so special, or that writer’s work so celebrated. Maybe the answer is among the bri-a-brac and the antique furniture, if only you look hard enough. Except it isn’t. Writers’ houses promise to tell us something about the writers who lived in them, but it is mostly an illusion. In any case by the time the curators and the tourists get there the writer is long gone.

The connection with Orwell is partly what drew us to Barnhill, but what we took away was not much to do with him. A week at Barnhill is not like a week in the wilderness—far from it—but it is enough for nature to let you to know where you stand in the order of things. It is long enough to fall into a rhythm of light and dark, of what needs to be done not because of the time, but because it needs to be done. Maybe that’s why it appealed so much to a four year-old; that and the claw-foot bath. Barnhill is a very special place and part of its specialness comes from that connection with Orwell and his extraordinary book. But mostly Barnhill is special because of where it is—the sea, the rocks, the deer on the ridge, the seals in the bay—and because of what it lets you see and keep to yourself.

Here’s the link to Robert McCrum’s article again.

To mark the start of Children’s Heart Week which begins on Saturday, I will be on Woman’s Hour this Friday, May 8th, BBC Radio 4 at 10am.

I’m hoping to raise awareness of congenital heart disease by reading some of the poems I’ve written about my daughter Ella. Ella was born with a severe heart defect in 2007 and I’ll be talking about her short but incredible life.

There will be a Children’s Heart Federation appeal on Radio 4, on Sunday May 10th: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k7qy8

Thank you for listening if you can.

A number of my Ella poems are available to read in the latest issue of Shadowtrain magazine.

Children’s Heart Federation
1 in every 133 children is born with a heart defect. Our vision is of a society in which all children with congenital heart disease can live life to the full because their medical, educational and social needs have been met. Charity Registration No 1120557 http://www.childrens-heart-fed.org.uk/

The programme will be available for on ‘listen again’ for seven days from Friday and as a podcast.

Meanwhile, more information is emerging about Chandler’s life in the United States before he moved to England. Chandler researcher Loren Latker has uncovered evidence of Chandler attending school in Plattsmouth, Nebraska in 1895 and 1896 and this, combined with Nebraska census records showing he and his mother were resident in Plattsmouth in 1900, suggests that he did not move to the UK in 1895 as has been commonly thought. It seems more likely that he and his mother crossed the Atlantic in June 1900 so that he could begin his studies at Dulwich.

More on Chandler’s early life here [Updated]