James Elroy Flecker, Lewisham-born Poet

On this day (January 3rd) in 1915, the poet James Elroy Flecker died at Davos in Switzerland from tuberculois. He was only thirty years old.

A plaque in Lewisham at 9 Gilmore Road SE13 commemorates his birthplace in 1884 (the plaque was placed there by the Greater London Council in 1986). According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: 'He was the elder son of the Revd William Herman Flecker DD (b. 1859), sometime headmaster of Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and his wife, Sarah Ducat. Both of his parents were of Jewish descent'. He doesn't seem to have stayed in Lewisham for long, as at the age of two his family moved to Cheltenham when his father became head of Dean Close School.

photo from London Remembers entry on this plaque

One of his poems, Ballad of the Londoner, deals with that age old London romantic problem - a lover on the other side of the river (from his collection Forty-Two Poems):

BALLAD OF THE LONDONER

Evening falls on the smoky walls,
And the railings drip with rain,
And I will cross the old river
To see my girl again.

The great and solemn-gliding tram,
Love's still-mysterious car,
Has many a light of gold and white,
And a single dark red star.

I know a garden in a street
Which no one ever knew;
I know a rose beyond the Thames,
Where flowers are pale and few.

Much of his other work could be described as orientalist - an extract from his verse drama 'Hassan : the story of Hassan of Bagdad, and how he came to make the golden journey to Samarkand' features on the regimental clock at the headquarters of the SAS:

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea

Also sometimes remembered is his poem 'To a Poet A Thousand Years Hence':

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along....