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A LANCASHIRE LEGEND
This year witnesses the 100th anniversary of one of
Lancashire’s most iconic writers.
Joan Pomfret was born
on May 13th 1913 in Darwen. She was to say in later life that
she was always being told off at school for daydreaming as her young
writer’s imagination took over.
When she was fifteen
years of age the family moved to Preston and Joan joined Preston Poets’
Society and taught at Preston School for the Deaf. It was while in that
town she joined Lancashire Authors’ Association at the age of seventeen.
That was in 1930 and
Joan soon started winning poetry cups, becoming one of the first winners
of the association’s Batty Cup,
which was awarded for poems in standard English.
Apart from her native
Lancashire, Joan had a lifelong affinity with the Isle of Man and this
is where she met her first love, a Manx lad named David. He was a sailor
and they became engaged. It seemed that Joan had met her soul-mate and
they were to meet in a Liverpool boarding house to finalise their
wedding arrangements.
David was on weekend
leave and Joan arranged to meet him on the Sunday. She soon sensed that
something was different and was later to learn that the landlady’s
daughter had descended the stairs in a yellow dress the previous evening
and stolen David’s heart. Subsequently their last meeting was in
Fleetwood where she remembers sharing fish and chips at the Euston
Hotel.
This is all
documented in her poem: The Girl
in the Yellow Dress, which tells the whole story eloquently and
gives us a view of Joan’s ability to write wonderful poems.
From Preston, Joan
moved to Worsley, Manchester where she met Douglas Townsend, a young
architect, and they went back to Preston and married at the Church of St
Jude with St Paul in the late summer of 1937.
Joan was heartbroken
when she heard of the death of David, whose ship was torpedoed off the
Norwegian coast in the first two weeks of the start of the Second World
War. Although Douglas and Joan were to spend over forty years together
in a happy marriage, as all first loves, she never forgot David as was
evident in a poem she wrote on a subsequent visit to Norway, in 1990,
where she revisited the point at which his ship went down. Norway had
been one of Joan’s favourite countries and spawned many poems about its
beauty.
It was on one of her
visits to Norway, that she met a lady on a coastal steamer who was also
an author and wrote historical novels under the name of Rosalind Laker.
Barbara (Rosalind’s real name) was married to a Norwegian called Inge
Øvstedal and the pair settled in Bognor Regis, but also had a summer
home in Norway. Barbara and Joan were both hopeless romantics and forged
a life-long friendship.
It was the recent
death of Barbara that led to two albums, a tape and a novel that Joan
had given Barbara over their years of friendship being donated by
Barbara’s daughter, Sue Keane to Lancashire Authors’ Association where
these facts about Joan came to light.
At Lancashire
Authors’ Joan became better known as a dialect poet and it is probably
as such she is best remembered, editing and authoring several books in
the 1960s and early 1970s including her own work:
Poems (1963),
Summat From Home (1964) and
Nowt So
Queer
(1969) and as editor:
Lancashire Evergreens:
100 Favourite Poems (1969) and
Twixt Thee and Me: an anthology
of Yorkshire and Lancashire Verse and Prose (1973).
It is indeed as
someone who helped to bring back the popularity of Lancashire Dialect at
a time that it was waning that Joan will go down in Lancashire history
and that is a wonderful legacy but by no means the whole story.
Joan was an excellent
writer in not only standard and dialect poetry but as a story writer
also and in 1974 published a novel called
Mermaid’s Moon. It was a
historical romance of a bygone era set at Sunderland Point near
Lancaster in 1763.
Eventually Douglas
was offered a partnership in an Accrington firm –
Grimshaw and Townsend - and
the pair moved into a flat in Whalley Road until they could find
somewhere more permanent. Douglas was also a writer and wrote fishing
books.
In 1950 they found a
derelict farm in Great Harwood and decided to renovate it, along with
another family, into two large cottages. The result was a stunning home
with a wonderful view and a fitting place for a writer to live. Stoops
Farm is its name and it is situated off Whalley Road next to Great
Harwood Golf Club.
Joan soon became active in the
Great Harwood Community and was proud to become involved with Great
Harwood Male Voice Choir, and eventually their first lady President. She
even wrote a song for the choir called:
The Bells of St Mary’s.
Joan remained a
staunch member of Lancashire Authors’ and became Vice President, a role
which gave her immense pride. In 1981, Douglas sadly died, but she
refused to give up her Great Harwood home, although as she freely
admitted it was far too big for one person.
For a few more years,
Joan, who always wrote under her maiden name, kept busy editing and
publishing the work of others as well as writing prolifically. Later she
was to struggle with mobility but on good days still addressed meetings
of women’s organisations.
Eventually when she
became too ill to go out any more, she was granted her final wish and
died in her idyllic cottage on September 29th 1993 at the age
of eighty.
At the time of her
death, not only were obituaries written in the Lancashire Evening
Telegraph and Accrington Observer, but also a wonderful and glowing one
in the Isle of Man Examiner. In her time there she wrote a booklet of
poems about the island, including a very poignant one about the railway
line to Peel that was closed to her dismay.
The Old Peel Line has some
wonderful images and finishes with these lines:
“And how I wish Time
could turn back
Along that narrow
weed-grown track –
That once more I
could catch a train To Peel, and my youth again”.
All in all Joan
Townsend was a remarkable woman who left a legacy that Lancashire can be
proud of.
© Peter Jones 2013 |