William Henry Davies or W. H. Davies
Biography
W. H. Davies born July 3rd 1871 was a Welsh poet and writer. Davies spent a significant part of his life as a tramp or vagabond in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time. The principal themes in his work are the marvels of nature, observations about life’s hardships, his own tramping adventures and the various characters Davies met. Davies is usually considered as one of the Georgian poets, although much of his work is atypical of the style and themes adopted by others of the genre.
Davies the son of an iron moulder was born at 6, Portland Street in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport, Monmouthshire and a busy port. Davies’ father died when he was two. When his mother remarried she agreed that care of the three children should pass to their paternal grandparents who ran the nearby Church House Inn at 14, Portland Street. His grandfather Francis Boase Davies, originally from Cornwall, had been a sea captain. Davies was related to the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving, referred to as cousin Brodribb by the family.
In his 1918 “Poet’s Pilgrimage” Davies recounts the time when, at the age of 14, he had been left with orders’ to sit with his dying grandfather. Davies missed the final moments of his grandfather’s passing as he had been too engrossed in reading “a very interesting book of wild adventure”.
Davies finishing school under a cloud at the age of 15, having been given twelve strokes of the birch for shoplifting with a gang of school mates. His grandmother signed the papers for Davies to become an apprentice to a local picture frame maker. Davies never enjoyed the craft, however, but never settled into any regular work. Davies was a difficult and somewhat delinquent young man, and made repeated requests to his grandmother to lend him the money to sail to America. When these were all refused, Davies eventually left Newport, took casual work and started to travel. The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, published in 1908, covers his life in the USA between 1893 and 1899, and includes many adventures and characters from his travels as a drifter. During this period, he crossed the Atlantic at least seven times working on cattle ships. Davies traveled through many of the States, sometimes begging, sometimes taking seasonal work, but often ending up spending any savings on a drinking spree with a fellow traveler. At one stage, on his way to Memphis, Tennessee he lay alone in a swamp for three days and nights suffering from malaria.
The turning point in Davies’ life came when he read in England of the riches to be made in the Klondike and immediately set off to make his fortune in Canada. Attempting to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario with fellow tramp Three fingered Jack, he lost his footing and his right foot was crushed under the wheels of the train. The leg later had to be amputated below the knee and thereafter Davies wore a wooden leg. Davies’ biographers have agreed that the significance of the accident should not be underestimated, even though Davies himself played down the story. Moult begins his biography with the incident and Stonesifer has suggested that this event more than any other led Davies to become a professional poet. Davies himself wrote of the accident: “I bore this accident with an outward fortitude that was far from the true state of my feelings. Thinking of my present helplessness caused me many a bitter moment, but I managed to impress all comers with a false indifference. I was soon home again, having been away less than four months, but all the wildness had been taken out of me, and my adventures after this were not of my own seeking, but the result of circumstances.” Davies’ view of his own disability was ambivalent. In his poem “The Fog”, published in the 1913 Foliage a blind man leads the poet through the fog, showing the reader that one who is handicapped in one domain may well have a considerable advantage in another. W. H. Davies died on September 26th 1940. Davies was not born in Renfrew Ontario but ended up there. Davies’ story is one worth reading, as well as an honour to be added to the famous residents of Renfrew, Ontario.