No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
‘ON a gloomy and foggy day, one of the worst and foggiest which even London can produce,’ James Elroy Flecker was born in Gilmore Road, Lewisham. The date was November 5th 1884, and his father, the Rev. W. H. Flecker, was the first headmaster of the City of London College School. The future poet
‘had the appearance of a child of two months, with well-developed and already expressive features. His blue-grey eyes, his sudden movements, and more than all his masses of long black hair gave him an elf-like look, which should, perhaps, have suggested the unusual gifts of this boy.’
As a child he was obstinate, very observant, and sensitive, with a nervousness which ‘rendered him liable to all kinds of fears,’ and a passionate temper which often’ culminated in outbursts of almost uncontrollable screaming.’ He had an early terror and dread of water, and ‘he screamed until he was taken out of sight and sound of the sea.’ When he was older, having been forced at the age of five to accept the drastic remedy of being taught to swim, he found his great delight in bathing, whether in sea, lake, or river, and,
‘with life’s accustomed irony, it fell out that it was a plunge into the Black Sea, after a long and very hot coast ride from Constantinople, which gave him a chill, developing first into pneumonia, and thus preparing the way for the illness which in the end killed him at Davos.’
* The Life of James Elroy Flecker. By Geraldine Hodgson, Litt.D. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 12/6 net.)