A plaque for Catford's Antarctic Explorer

'On Saturday 10th September, a Lewisham Council plaque will be unveiled to mark the Catford residence of Captain William Colbeck (1871–1930).  Captain Colbeck moved to 51 Inchmery Road in 1913, following an adventurous career at sea, which included:

• being a member of the first expedition to spend a whole year on the Antarctic continent (The Southern Cross expedition, 1898–1900)

• travelling further south than anyone previously (to 78° 50’, on 17 February 1900), with the Norwegian leader of the expedition, Carsten Borchgrevink

• bringing food and fuel supplies to Captain Scott and his men on the ice-bound Discovery in 1903, and again in 1904

• helping to release the Discovery from the ice, by blasting open an 18-mile passage to the open sea.

The plaque has been funded by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT) and the Culverley Green Residents’ Association.  It will be unveiled by Dr Kevin Fewster, Director of the National Maritime Museum.  Also present will be Camilla Nichol, Chief Executive of the UKAHT, and Heidi Alexander, MP, along with descendants of Captain Colbeck and other figures from the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration'. 

This will be the third plaque in Lewisham to an Antarctic explorer, joining Sir James Clark Ross in Blackheath and Sir Ernest Shackleton in Sydenham. The borough can thus boast a record three of the six Antarctic plaques in London.

Official unveiling:

51 Inchmery Road, Catford, SE6 2N, Saturday 10 September 2016, 11.30am-12noon

 

 

 

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....