Khushwant singh

A photograph poem
William saroyan
Walt whitman

•

Shirley Toulson

In Memoriam

I have discovered that Shirley Toulson, poet and author of many books on droving and green lanes, died just over a year ago in October 2018.

I wrote to her when I first started my interest in drovers' roads and she was kind enough to reply. She suggested we went walking together with a friend of hers, but for some reason the walk never materialised. I blame myself. I would like to have met the erudite lady.

In 1976 Shirley Toulson recorded a live interview with Mr Morris Roberts, a drover, and was kind enough to send me a transcript of it. I'm certain she wouldn't have minded my including it here – although she confessed that she hated the internet. Call it a tribute:

Mr Roberts was born in Hendra Maur, near Bala in Mid-Wales, in 1901. His father Robert was a farmer and dealer. He has one brother who is a dealer near Corwen and another who is a London doctor. He had three brothers & two sisters.

As a child he went to school in the mountains

•

liveenglish11

Shirley Toulson – A Bio Sketch

Shirley Toulson was born on 20th May 1924 in Henley-on-Thames, England as the daughter of Douglas Horsfall Dixon and Marjorie Brown. She had a huge passion on writing and was greatly influenced y her father who was a writer too. She secured a B.A on Literature from Brockenhurst College in London in the year 1953. Shortly, she took writing as career but also served as the editor for many magazines in meantime. She married Alan Brownjohn on 6th February 1960. They had three children – Janet Sayers, Ian Toulson and Steven brownjohn. ut after nine years they divorced on March 1969. Celtic Christianity influenced her greatly that most of her major works like “Celtic Alternative” in 1987 and “Celtic Year” in 1993 were on that topic. But these works indeed made her more famous.

Short Synopsis

A photograph descries 3 stages. In the first stage, the photograph shows the poet’s mother standing at the each enjoying her holiday ith her two girl cousins. She was 12 or so at that time. The second st

•

Shirley Toulson, poet and writer about Britain’s walks

SHIRLEY TOULSON, who has died, aged 94, was a highly- regarded poet and an innovative writer about Britain’s walks, ancient tracks and traditions.

Her poetry was broadcast and published in journals (The Listener, Tribune, Ambit and Outposts), in a book, Shadows in an Orchard (1960), and in a poetry collection, A Group Anthology (1963), edited by Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith.

Further books included Circumcision’s Not Such a Bad Thing After All (1970) and The Fault, Dear Brutus: A Zodiac of Sonnets (1972), both published by Roy Lewis, the commonwealth correspondent of the Times, on his Keepsake Press for which she became adviser and commissioning editor following his death in 1996.

By then, as well as continuing to write poetry, Shirley had made a breakthrough with her eloquent account of the lives, countryside and people involved in bringing livestock from Wales to England.

Her resulting book, The Drovers’ Roads of Wales (1977), magnificently illustrated by the photographer Fay Godwin, spawn