Our guest for this episode is Mark Wormald, current chair of the Ted Hughes Society, and a leading scholar, editor and irrepressible enthusiast for the work of Ted Hughes.
In this latest podcast in the short series ‘Meet Our Folks’, Mark traces his growing scholarly and personal interest in Ted Hughes’s poetry and life and Hughes passionate concern for the preservation and cleanliness of Britain’s rivers - a concern they both have in common.
Mark hosted the conference Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected, which was held at Pembroke college where Hughes had been an undergraduate and Mark was then Senior Tutor and Director of Studies for part 2 English. The conference led to a critical essay collection with the same title, edited by Mark and Neil Roberts and published in 2013, and also Mark’s election as Chair of the Ted Hughes Society and to his widely read and much praised book, The Catch: in search of Ted Hughes published in 2022.
Hughes studied English Literature and then Archaeology and Anthropology at Pembroke College from 1951 to 1954, and as we’ll hear, thanks to Mark’s astute curation and tenacious fund-raising, Pembroke College now holds an extensive and growing archive of Hughes's original manuscripts, printed books, letters, and artwork for Hughes’s books.
As Mark relates, the college has also acquired Hughes’s writing desk and chair, as well as a correspondence and previously unseen work shared with close friends like Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke whose work and close friendships with not only Hughes but also Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Hughes’s son Nicholas, is the focal point of the exhibition Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers is presently on two sites: Pembroke College and the University Library of the University of Cambridge (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1KeJHtJDUa/).
Also, due to Mark’s remarkable detective skills, the mystery of where in Pembroke College Ted Hughes claimed to have his dream of The Scorched Fox, and also where he barbecued steaks over a gas fire and painted pictures of leopards on the ceiling, may at last have been solved!
The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)
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