A campaign to save East Coker

Sandra Snelling of the East Coker Preservation Trust writes:

The Somerset village of East Coker, where T. S. Eliot is interred, is shortly going to be swamped by 3,750 new houses and an industrial estate. The plan is being pushed through by a Liberal Democrat councilor on the South Somerset Council who admits his ignorance of its cultural significance, adding "I don't like poetry" and "You may well personally hold that a dead poet's tomb is a national monument, and that the setting extends for miles around, but as I understand it Elliott only had a passing link with the village, being the family home rather than his chosen place of regular abode. He was so overwhelmed with East Coker that he mentioned it in a poem once."

If the council does not very soon feel a groundswell of opposition from those who appreciate the beauty and literary importance of the village, this scheme will be unstoppable. Please will you help us to prevent that, by sending an email to the members of the council whose addresses appear below -- and by sending this appeal on to any of your friends who might also like to help? The East Coker Preservation Trust will be happy to provide any more information you need. It will be much appreciated if you feel able to write.

The campaign online: Facebook | Website | Blog | Twitter | YouTube

Members of the South Somerset District Council, and other gov't. contacts:

• andy.foyne@southsomerset.gov.uk
• rina.singh@southsomerset.gov.uk
• mark.williams@southsomerset.gov.uk
• peter.seib@southsomerset.gov.uk
• patrick.palmer@southsomerset.gov.uk
• david.laws.MP@parliament.uk
• caroline.power@english-heritage.org.uk
• john.richardson@southsomerset.gov.uk
• cathy.bakewell@southsomerset.gov.uk
• carol.goodall@southsomerset.gov.uk
• susan.steele@southsomerset.gov.uk
• marcus.fysh@southsomerset.gov.uk
• tony.fife@southsomerset.gov.uk
• john.chainey@southsomerset.gov.uk
• peter.gubbins@southsomerset.gov.uk
• andrew.kendall@southsomerset.gov.uk
• david.recardo@southsomerset.gov.uk
• dave.greene@southsomerset.gov.uk
• tony.lock@southsomerset.gov.uk
• tim.carroll@southsomerset.gov.uk
• ian.martin@southsomerset.gov.uk
• wes.read@southsomerset.gov.uk
• jon.gleeson@southsomerset.gov.uk
• pauline.lock@southsomerset.gov.uk
• graham.oakes@southsomerset.gov.uk
• nigel.gage@southsomerset.gov.uk
• ric.pallister@southsomerset.gov.uk
• martin.wale@southsomerset.gov.uk
• tim.carroll@southsomerset.gov.uk
• angie.singleton@southsomerset.gov.uk
• adron.duckworth@southsomerset.gov.uk

Photos -- "showing what is at stake" -- courtesy Jim McCue.

Eliot on Jones

Meeting of the directors in the Faber and Faber board room in 1944, 'round a table filled with readers' reports and bottles of beer'.  Sir Geoffrey Faber, the chairman and founder of the firm is in the center. T. S. Eliot is on the extreme left.

In his early years at Faber Eliot’s reports on poetry collections are written to tell his colleagues about the types of verse which he considered that the firm should steer clear of.  He was normally very diplomatic, but the feeble verse that a well-known aesthete had submitted received a terse one-line report: ‘I cannot endure this stuff’. One of Eliot’s most perceptive reports is on the manuscript of In Parenthesis, the great work about the First World War by the poet and artist David Jones, dated September 1936.  He does not overstate the importance of the work but draws out the Arthurian and Kiplingesque qualities that he knows will appeal to particular colleagues on the Book Committee. Typically self-deprecatory, he admits his views may not be widely shared: ‘I have not the slightest notion whether what I see in the book is really there, or if it is there, whether it will reach more than a few people’.

-- from "T. S. Eliot and the Faber Book Committee", a post by Faber archivist Robert Brown, over at The Thought Fox. [Also cross-posted to The Wonder Reflex; hat-tip to Don Share for sharing this.]