U A Fanthorpe

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2004

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is one of Britain's best loved poets - U A Fanthorpe. She was the first woman ever to be nominated for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry and in 2003 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. But she found her vocation late in life. She trained as a teacher and was head of the English department at Cheltenham Ladies College when she says she felt her life was in crisis and became a 'middle aged drop-out'. Against the advice of her family and to the surprise of many friends, she quit teaching to become a temporary clerical worker. She took a job as a clerk in a hospital for neuro-psychiatric patients and, within days, knew that she had to write about what she saw - to bear witness to what the patients were experiencing. Her first collection of poems, Side Effects, was published in 1978 when U A Fanthorpe was 49.

Since then she has written many more volumes. Her poems use a great deal of humour and a lot of dialogue. In addition to her work about patients and hospitals, much of her writing is concerned with war and its effects on children on the nature of Englishness and the British character.

During the interview, U A Fanthorpe reads extracts from the following poems: 'The List' taken from Selected Poems, and 'Atlas' from Safe As Houses.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Come Away With Fellow Sailors by Henry Purcell Book: A book to identify birdlife on the island Luxury: Bath with soap and towels

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet. She was nearly 50 before she produced her first book of poetry before that.
0:37.0	She'd spent a well-proportioned middle-class life, the daughter of a judge who became a head of department at Cheltenham Ladies College.
0:44.6	It wasn't until she turned her back on her teaching career that she started to write, and today
0:49.0	she's one of Britain's most popular poets and was a serious candidate for poet laureate last time around.
0:54.7	Her work is very English, rye, humorous, but always compassionate, whether she's writing about
1:00.4	the history of her homeland, this narrow island charged with echoes and
1:04.7	whispers, or those who inhabit its present, the high-rise people and the
1:09.0	dispossessed, the tele-idels, fat men in fast cars. She's always clear-eyed and uncomplicated. As she says, it's absurd to make
1:18.6	things so difficult they can't be understood. She is Ursula Ascombe Fanthorpe, better known as U-A-Fanthorpe. Have you always
1:26.7	been U-A-U-A? Or was it something that happened when you got published?
1:32.1	When I got published, yes, I suddenly decided to re-aptize myself.
1:37.0	And Ursula had always been a burden to me rather,
1:40.0	because people said, what?
1:42.0	Or how do you spell it or occasionally oh I know what that means
1:46.0	little bear none of which I have much cared for so it was a kind of liberation was
1:49.8	yes yes a new life a new me and this as I mentioned in the introduction, happened when you were around about 50,
1:56.0	approaching 50 anyway, after a career in the English department at Cheltenham Ladies,
2:00.0	when you became a kind of middle-aged dropout, gave gave it all up and went to work in a hospital in Bristol,
2:06.0	which is where you found inspiration to write your poetry. Now why and how?
2:11.0	Well, in the first place I was a person of such excruciating unimportant
	...

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