The Oxford Recitations
August 29th, 2023
This year marks the 100 year anniversary of a prestigious poetry speaking contest at Oxford in which my grandmother Diana Homer was a prizewinning speaker.
In the spring of 1923 the future Poet Laureate John Masefield made an announcement to The Times that he would be holding a verse speaking contest at Oxford. Masefield was an orphan sent away to sea at thirteen by an aunt who disapproved of his compulsive reading. A distressed seaman abroad and almost shipwrecked, he used his awe-inspiring voyages to inform much of his early writing, including Salt Water Ballads (1902) and Dauber (1913). Now, his plan was to discover a raft of beautiful speakers passionate about poetry to create a mainstream tradition for its performance.
As the principal organisers of the contest, John Masefield and his wife Constance sought help from their circle at Oxford. Gilbert Murray, the Regis Professor of Greek, George Gordon, a Professor of English Literature, Sir Herbert Warren, the President of Magdalen, and two winners of the Newdigate Prize: Laurence Binyon and Heathcote Garrod, a Professor of Poetry, all agreed to act as judges. George Gordon named the two day festival The Oxford Recitations, and gave the opening speech at The Examination Schools on July 26th 1923.
Over five hundred contestants entered, exceeding all expectations. But, after hearing the first dozen or so speakers, Masefield wondered had he made a mistake in pushing for the contest, when a young woman began to speak in a way that made him hold his breath. He later recalled, “I had heard nothing like it. What I had not imagined was the power of such speech upon an audience, which sat as if in a trance.”
A recital by Diana Homer, the daughter of the Unitarian Minister F.A.Homer, would have a similar effect upon John Masefield. Diana was my grandmother, then a teenager drawn to Oxford with a headful of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton set by the judges as test poems in the syllabus, which had been mailed ahead of the competition. She would be a constant winner in the women’s division until 1929. More about that later.
On the whole, the first year of the Recitations revealed impressive talent and application. Each judge selected two favourites from amongst the trained speakers, talented amateurs, up and coming actors and students competing in the ballad, lyric, dramatic and narrative classes to battle it out in the Oxford Prize Class Finals. Highly coveted silver and bronze medals were awarded to the first and second place men and women with prizes of around £200 in today’s money for the exceptional speakers.
The contest took place at the Schools from morning until late in the evening. Door stewards ensured the recitals went undisturbed and prevented the audience from questioning the judges about their decisions, or from asking them for autographs. Clapping was restrained during the day in case exams were taking place elsewhere in the building. But, on Finals night, the crowd was roused into rip-roaring song, ending with a resounding, “Three cheers for Mr and Mrs Masefield!”
A Choir of Nightingales
John Masefield was guided by the revolutionary impules of WB Yeats, whose lecture in Lincoln’s Inn on new ways of speaking poetry he attended as a young man in 1901. Yeats’s methods, with his emphasis on the vowels and the beats, was a step towards realising the poet’s intention, but also a challenge to the stuffy Victorian drawing room approach to recitation. Masefield became a regular visitor to the Monday evening gatherings for poets, writers and painters held in what he described as, "the most interesting rooms in London" in which Yeats overwintered every year between 1895-1919.
By 1924, Masefield had resolved the earlier problems of his contestants shrieking, whispering, going prone or falling off the stage. A third day was added and most speakers were displaying the poems with their voices rather than outlandish gestures. He declared the effect of probably the best speakers in these islands gathered together was that of, “A choir of nightingales.” The excitement and delight of the poetry touched all present with a new feeling for poetry and a new understanding of the principle of speaking it
The judges were keen to attract males, outnumbered five to one by females. And, their note in the syllabus expressed an explicit bias: “Poetry at its best being made by men, is best spoken by men …Whenever poetry has been a popular delight the voices of men have made it so.” However, this was not the perspective of the many observers of the Recitations. In 1927, The Times reported, “Beautiful as the men’s test piece, taken from Laurence Binyon’s translation of Dante’s Inferno was, the lines spoken by the women, which comes from the same source, will perhaps remain longer in the memory.” Adding, “The depth of the men’s voices was their main fascination, but we fancied that the women’s enunciation was clearer.”
A ringing bell summoned Diana Homer, then nineteen years old, to the isolation of the stage. Her recitation of a part of Samson Agonistes caught the ear of John Masefield in his customary white dress suit, black socks and shoes and a pink carnation buttonhole, alongside Constance in her gold sandals. After three days of competition, Diana won the Oxford Prize for The Best and Most Beautiful Individual Piece of Speech.Three years later in 1928, Milton’s poem was amongst His Master’s Voice (HMV) first ever 78rpm recordings of verse using the voice of Clifford Turner, a winner noted by Masefield in the men’s contest.
In 1927, Margery Bryce, an actor and a member of the Women’s Socialist Party Union (WSPU) entered the contest. Her teenage activism perhaps having some influence on the vote given to all women the following year. Bryce had led a 40,000 strong Suffrage procession through London in 1911 on a white horse bearing the WSPU banner, wearing the battledress of Joan of Arc. Her embodiment of the spirit of St Joan, canonised in 1920, exemplified the courage of the women’s movement.
Bryce was praised by all the judges for her Hellas: Chorus by Shelley. She participated again at the 1928 Recitations.
The actor Alistair Sim, then a Fulton Lecturer in Elocution at New College, Edinburgh, shone brightly at Oxford, where his love of poetry and talent for speech was a winning combination. Sim and Homer dominated the men’s and women’s recitations between 1924-1929. In 1926, when the poet Walter de la Mare and the poetry publisher Harold Munro joined the judges, Sim won the men's bronze medal and classes 1 and 2, and Homer won the women's class 2. Two years on, with the addition of the poet-judge Lascelles Abercrombie, Diana Homer won the women's bronze medal and class 3, beating Margery Bryce into second place.
Through his involvement with the Oxford Recitations, Alistair Sim became one of Britain’s finest and funniest character actors. Under the guidance of John Masefield’s friend the playwright and poet John Drinkwater, Sim found stage success and was later the star of over fifty films. He is perhaps best known as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951), and for the dual roles of Clarence and his twin sister Miss Fritton, the hapless headmistress of the unruly girls in The Belles of St Trinians (1954). In The Green Man (1956) Sim mimics John Masefield’s habit of popping a carnation into his buttonhole.
The Flowers of Speech
In the main, the contest was producing a flowering rather than a withering effect. John Laurie, a notable actor fresh out of drama school in 1923, made an impression on all present. Laurence Binyon remarked, ”Is not John Laurie the best of a mixed bag, he knows what to do with verse.” Laurie would later complain he was considered to be the finest speaker of verse in this country, and yet became famous for doing, “this rubbish.” Laurie is, of course, referring to Dad’s Army, in which he plays the disgruntled Private Frazer, part of a bungling troop of British Home Guards. His distinctive rolling of the letter r was likely a mannerism he borrowed from the poet Ezra Pound to make his catchphrase, “We’re doomed, doomed,” all the more memorable.
Alfred Hitchcock cast John Laurie in a supporting role to Robert Donat as the spy Major General Richard Hannay in his film version of The 39 Steps (1935), a novel written twenty years earlier by the politician John Buchan, listed as a judge in 1927.
By coincidence, Robert Donat (pictured right) also had a connection to the Oxford Recitations, first
entering in 1923 as a teenager overcoming a stutter. He was then an elocution student of the Unitarian Minister James Bernard, who helped Donat make his professional debut as Lucius in Julius Caesar at the Prince of Wales, Birmingham in 1921, aged 16. Donat returned to Oxford in 1929 to take part in John Masefield’s verse dramas at his home theatre on Boars Hill.
Voices From A Poets Garden
It was quite something to be invited up the hill to Masefield’s Music Room theatre set amongst the lovely flowers, hedges and trees of his garden, from where he reported having seen seventy-seven kinds of birds one summer. Word of his beautiful voices was spreading, The Evening News reporting: "You do not know how enjoyable poetry can be until you have heard it from the lips of a Masefield Finalist." And, in 1926, the recently formed BBC sent its talent scouts to Masefield’s door for a list of his best speakers.
At the 1929 Recitations, there were no judges, just “helpers,”reflecting Masefield’s increasing desire to eliminate the competitive element, which he had grown to dislike. Alongside his favourite poems he commissioned new poems and verse plays by several poet-judges for two days of recital. The performances served as a testbed for the poet’s new works to be published shortly afterwards. The sixteen speakers he invited to demonstrate the art of beautiful speech included Diana Homer, Alistair Sim, Robert Donat and Rose Bruford, who, although not a prize winner at Oxford, would later found her prestigious theatre school under Masefield’s influential patronage.
Amongst the helpers was the Bloomsbury poet Robert Trevelyan, father of the Surrealist painter and poet Julian Trevelyan. Also present was Henry Nevinson, the father of the prominent war artist C.W. Nevinson (Bursting Shell, pictured left). Henry Nevinson was a war correspondent who helped to found the Friends Ambulance Service during the First World War. Father and son ferried the wounded to the disused warehouses in Dunkirk known as The Shambles. Still healing from the agony of war, Henry bitterly complained the speakers came from the middle classes until he became visibly moved by the transcendence of one woman’s speech.
The Oxford Festival and Summer Diversions
In 1930, John Masefield’s appointment to Poet Laureate effectively forced his retirement from the Recitations. Laurence Binyon (pictured left) took charge by swiftly reinstating the competition, which he renamed The Oxford Festival of Spoken Verse, and briefly joining forces with the English Verse Speaking Association. Tensions between Binyon and Masefield appeared to reach breaking point in 1937 when Masefield launched his non-competitive Oxford Summer Diversions with Merton Professor of English Literature, Neville Coghill. JRR Tolkien was invited to recite Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, and the following year, The Knight’sTale, which he did entirely from memory with his ten year daughter in the audience.
The perception of rivalry between Binyon and Masefield went back to 1913,when both men were tipped for Poet Laureate, with Masefield finally succeeding on the death of Robert Bridges. Over time, Binyon’s emotive poem For The Fallen (1914) had become the centrepiece of the worldwide Anzac and Memorial Day services, which started in 1918 and continues today, and was the inspiration for Elgar’s Spirit of England Suite (!917). Despite Binyon’s fellow judges’s pleas to hold a joint evening with Masefield’s Diversions at a packed Rhodes House, he opted to keep the two events separate, saying the two men were complimentary to each other.
The poems selected for recital at The Oxford Festival were intended to be brief enough to save the audience and the judges from boredom. But not all of the judges considered themselves entertained. In 1937 the playwright Clifford Bax wrote to the organisers begging to resign his post: “I cannot come to Oxford next year. I CANNOT ENDURE IT! I cannot endure to hear the same poems over and over again.”
T.S Eliot politely refused his invitation to be a judge at Oxford in 1935. He responded: “I do not feel, however, that I am qualified to be a judge at such competitions, and it is a task from which I beg to be excused.” However, in private, Eliot railed against the idea of public poetry recitals, saying “The English Verse Speaking Association is a monstrous cancer in this land stretching now its foul tentacles towards the public house.” Where, he demanded, is a man to go for a drink?
In 1937 the poets WH Auden, Vita Sackville West, the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Cecil Day Lewis (pictured left), the father of the actor Daniel Day Lewis, joined the judges. Binyon declared Auden and Sackville West to be real acquisitions; both keen, working hard and giving detailed criticism. His praise for Auden was unbridled, and by all accounts everyone was getting along with him. Binyon’s sentiments were recently echoed by probably the last living competitor of the Festival in her 102nd year. Whilst having no memory of the poetry she recited, Nona Greene (nee Nivea-Dashwood) remembers Auden as a handsome and charismatic fellow. The last Oxford Festival took place in 1939, coinciding with the onset of the Second World War and the death of WB Yeats.
Sadly, Diana Homer died a young woman in tragic circumstances in 1941. And, when the death of Laurence Binyon in 1943 left the contest rudderless, Cecil Day Lewis came to the rescue, transforming it into The London Festival of Spoken Poetry after the war. John Masefield continued to encourage the development of spoken poetry until the end of his life in 1967. He was succeeded as Poet Laureate by Cecil Day Lewis.