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The Kent Tramp Trail Find!
Rupert Croft-Cooke's Tonbridge autobiography, The Altar in the Loft, led me on a trail of detection. He mentions an encounter with the writer Bart Kennedy, "a burly man with a deep voice and the unkempt look considered proper for writers at the time." [1917.] Bart Kennedy wrote Golden Green* (another book that we have in the Tonbridge Library Local Studies collection.) With chapters like The Magic of Rain, Bird Psychology & A Pint of Beer, it is an eccentric book. The largest section is a paen to Walks & The Fine Art of Walking: "Perhaps things have gone hard with you. Perhaps you think that this wonderful life-gift that you have been vouchsafed is not worth possessing. If this is so, the magic of walking...will cure you. It will make you whole. Try it."
It turns out that Bart Kennedy was one of a number "Tramp" authors who became popular in Edwardian Britain & North America. In his younger days, he had been an itinerant labourer in the USA. His Who's Who entry claims that he "lived and fought with Indians; gold-mined up in Klondyke...became an opera singer and an actor (&) drifted into writing." Later on he became a foreign & war correspondent for newspapers like the Daily Mail. His idiosyncratic writing style was parodied by Katherine Mansfield & P.G. Wodehouse. [Kennedy appears as a character in the Wodehouse story/novella Swoop- or How Clarence Saved England.] http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/swoop10.txt
By strange coincidence, Kent provided a bolt-hole for one of the most famous "Tramp" authors, W.H. Davies. Through the generous patronage of the poet Edward Thomas, Davies spent 2 years living at Stidolph's cottage on Egg Pie Lane, The Weald. During that period he wrote about his own experiences as a Tramp in the USA, published as The Autobiography of a Supertramp. Davies also spent a period living at 45, London Rd, Sevenoaks http://www.sevenoaksartshop.co.uk/about_us.html during which his poetry collection Songs Of Joy and Others was published. This volume included his most famous poem, Leisure. Barbara Hooper's biography of W.H Davies, Time to stand and stare: a life of W H Davies, the tramp poet includes a photo of an unpublished poem that Davies sent to the Sevenoaks Chronicle.
I didn't know about this sub-genre of Tramp literature which grew in the Edwardian era and reached a peak in the 1920s. I've heard of the American "tramp" writer Jack London but not his contemporary Walter A Wycoff. & i'm not at all familiar with British-born tramp writers like Stephen Graham & Morely Roberts, so this is a real discovery for me.
*Golden Green is a Kent village, 4 miles from Tonbridge.
10 September 2009 from Rob Illingworth
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- Knole
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- On the write tracks in literary Kent - Day 3
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- On the write tracks in literary Kent
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- The Kent Tramp Trail
- The Altar in the Loft
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