Notes on Lowry and War: A Walk in Liverpool July 2014 Part 3

HMS Hyderabad at Bristol 1918

This is the final set of notes following a recent walk I led around Liverpool's Business Quarter and Riverfront organised by The Bluecoat, Liverpool.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2

Stop 5 Canning Dock

The character Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul in Lowry's Under The Volcano was a Lieutenant-Commander of the Q-Ship S.S. Samaritan during WW 1. In the novel, Firmin is haunted by his involvement in the deaths of a captured German U-Boat crew by placing them in the furnace of the Samaritan.

HMS  Baralong

Is the above based on fact? Possible sources:

Ronald Binns [MLN 8, 6] has tracked down the probable historical source of the Samaritan incident: the so-called "Baralong incident" of 19 August 1915, after the capture of the British ship, the SS Nicosian, by the German submarine U-27. A British Q-ship, the Baralong, appeared flying the American flag, let fall its false sides, and sank the submarine. The master, Lieutenant-Commander Godfrey Herbert (whose name and rank is similar to Geoffrey's), ordered his crew to give no quarter, and twelve German sailors were shot. See Baralong Incident for further details

The above was suppressed by British Government during and after war so how could Lowry know the details?

Source 1: Coles, Alan (1986). Slaughter at Sea: The Truth Behind a Naval War Crime - discusses the myth of German sailors being burnt in the furnaces of the SS Nicosian. See Pg 167 - Cole states several sources from Liverpool that this story was common in the docklands of Liverpool - could Lowry have heard these during 1927/28 when he sailed to the Far east and later haunted the dockland pubs?

Source 2: Lowry's brother Wilfrid was then a member of the Royal Naval Reserve based on H.M.S. Eagle (Eaglet) in Canning Dock during and shortly after WW1 - Some of the Q-ship commanders were in the RNR. e.g. Ronald Niel Stuart - he survived the war and was a local hero returning to service with the Canadian Pacific based in Liverpool. Stuart had been a member of the Royal Naval Reserve before the war and became a leading member when he returned.

It isn't impossible that Wilfrid may have heard stories/yarns or quite conceivably unpalatable truths of the Q-ship war, due to his access to sailors who had fought in the war. He may have related these stories to Lowry or Lowry may have heard them first hand and adapted them later from memories of an impressionable child in 1918/19.

S.S. Nicosian

Source 3: The SS Nicosian was owned by the Liverpool based Leyland line - crewed by local sailors - could one of them told Lowry what had happened? Lowry also sailed to the USA in 1928 aboard a Leyland ship SS Dorelian

Source 4: The Baralong Incident was widely reported outside the UK during the war including USA - many varied accounts were written including the furnace story - could Lowry have heard about this from a US source e.g. Conrad Aiken on Lowry's visit to Boston in 1928?

Bowker notes that Lowry wa taken by his bother Wilfrid to see a Q-ship in Liverpool in either late 1918 or 1919 (Bowker Pursued by Furies P16). The Lowry brothers saw a dummy run of the Q-ship drill, dropping the false bulkheads, exposing a gun, and firing a blank round.

The above visit was to see HMS Hyderabad - the ship was docked at Canning Dock in mid December 1918 (Liverpool Echo 27/11/18) as part of a nationwide tour to demonstrate how the ships operated against submarines. The photos below are part of a set made by Tierney's Studios of 6 Lord Street. Liverpool to record the event:

An unidentified U-Boat visited Canning Dock Liverpool around the same time as Hyderabad but full details are yet to be discovered. There is no evidence that Lowry visited the Uboat. Again the submarine was photographed by Tierney's - see photo below with caption "To the victors the spoils":

Lowry must have retained an interest in Q-ships as they appear in the short story 'Goya The Obscure' when Lowry notes an advert; "Mystery Ship VC Visits Wallasey" (Pg. 273). This relates to a lecture given by Vice Admiral Gordon Campbell at Wallasey Town Hall on Friday, January 10th 1930. The advert noted by Lowry appeared twice in the Wallasey News on December 21st 1929 and again on December 28th 1929. A short reminder also appeared inside the paper on December 28th as seen below:

Read more about the above lecture here

Leonard Campbell Taylor  Dazzle-painted ships, including Aquitania, in the Mersey off the Liverpool waterfront

See Edmund Gardner painted as a "dazzle ship"

Lowry refers to dazzle ships in Under The Volcano:

Hugh too was scrutinizing the Gothic writing beneath the photograph: Der englische Dampfer tragt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-boote. 'Only on the next page, I recall, was a picture of the Emden', the Consul went on, 'with "So verliess ich den Weltteil unserer Antipoden", something of that nature, under it...' – UTV, 184.

Chris Ackerley has discovered source:

Ger. "The English steamer carries camouflage against German U-boats." The American text corrects Lowry's error, ‘tragt’, which is perpetuated in the British text. In a letter to Albert Erskine [16 July 1946; CL 1, 611], Lowry says that he has lost the original, but that it depicted two photographs, the first a British Q-ship, and the second the Emden, as shown to him in a German restaurant in Mexico City, the captions in Gothic print. Despite this camouflage, his actual source was Felix Graf von Luckner's Seeteufel: Abenteuer aus meinem Leben [Sea Devil: adventures from my life] (K. F. Koehler, 1921), which, however, makes no mention of the Emden (von Luckner was in the South Pacific, the Emden in the Indian Ocean). The Malcolm Lowry Project

Chris Ackerely also notes:

In the Texas manuscript [TM VI, 45], Lowry is explicit about the connection between “Everything about the Samaritan was a fake” and Hugh’s like sense of himself; but in a marginal note wondered if it were not better to abandon the idea of fake altogether.

Lowry sailed back from USA in 1928 aboard the RMS Cedric which was painted in dazzle colours during WW1:

Sholto Johnstone Douglas SS 'Cedric', White Star Liner, Lying in the Mersey

(Mis)adventure: Malcolm Lowry & Conrad Aiken 1928–1954

Just come across this book which was new to me:

Both sides of this vital dialogue between Malcolm Lowry – dissolute, destitute, and laboriously writing Under the Volcano (1947) – and Conrad Aiken: his literary mentor, financial resource, an emotional security blanket, and friend.

37pp., three illustrations. 6” x 8½” Wrappers, $25

More info here

In a riverside tavern in Savannah

In a riverside tavern in Savannah. From the n.... section next door the juke box is playing Open the door Richard. We are in the 'Whites' drinking your health in claret (by the bottle & bought retail on the spot.) A note on the reverse of a photograph sent
Conrad Aiken 24 June 1947

The Lowrys visited Savannah in February 1947 while on a bus trip from Miami to New York.

"Open the Door, Richard" is a song first recorded on the Black & White Records label by saxophonistist Jack McVea at the suggestion of A&R man Ralph Bass. In 1947, it was the number-one song on Billboard's "Honor Roll of Hits" and became a runaway pop sensation.




"Open the Door, Richard" started out as a black vaudeville routine. Pigmeat Markham, one of several who performed the routine, attributed it to his mentor Bob Russell. The routine was made famous by Dusty Fletcher on stages like the Apollo Theater in New York and in a short film. Dressed in rags, drunk, and with a ladder as his only prop, Fletcher would repeatedly plunk the ladder down stage center, try to climb it to knock on an imaginary door, then crash sprawling on the floor after a few steps while shouting, half-singing "Open the Door, Richard". After this he would mutter a comic monologue, then try the ladder again and repeat the process, while the audience was imagining what Richard was so occupied doing.

Jack McVea was responsible for the musical riff which became associated with the words "Open the Door, Richard" that became familiar to radio listeners and as many as 14 different recordings were made. Read more on Wikipedia

The appeal of the song for Malc goes without saying! Though it is impossible to ascertain which version Malc heard. It could be anyone of these from 1946/47:

The recording by Count Basie was released by RCA Victor Records as catalog number 20-2127. It first reached the Billboard magazine Best Seller chart on February 7, 1947 and lasted four weeks on the chart, peaking at number one.

The recording by Dusty Fletcher was released by National Records as catalog number 4012. It first reached the Billboard Best Seller chart on January 31, 1947, and lasted five weeks on the chart, peaking at number three.

The recording by The Three Flames was released by Columbia Records as catalog number 37268. It first reached the Billboard Best Seller chart on February 14, 1947, and lasted three weeks on the chart, peaking at number four.

The recording by Louis Jordan was released by Decca Records as catalog number 23841. It first reached the Billboard Best Seller chart on March 7, 1947, and lasted two weeks on the chart, peaking at number seven.

The recording by Jack McVea, recorded in October 1946, was released by Black & White Records as catalog number 792. It first reached the Billboard Best Seller chart on February 14, 1947, and lasted two weeks on the chart, peaking at number seven.[6] As stated above, this was the original recording. Wikipedia

Here are the different versions:

Doris "Dolly" Lewis

Please play the Bix Beiderbecke track below entitled Dolly Dimples while you read this post:



Lowry met Dolly Lewis on his first trip to the USA in 1929.

Lowry first visited the USA after writing to the American poet Conrad Aiken who he had just discovered after reading Aiken's Blue Voyage, a book which had a profound effect on Lowry. Lowry had suggested to the recently unemployed Aiken that Aiken should become his mentor to help with entry to Cambridge University. Aiken couldn't turn the offer down once Lowry was able to secure funding from his father. When Lowry discovered that Aiken had recently returned to the USA, he "invited" himself over to meet his literary hero who would become his life-long friend. Initially, Lowry stayed with Conrad Aiken in Cambridge Massachusetts at Aiken's apartment in 8 Plymton Street.



The above apartment was just by the famous Grolier Poetry Book Shop opened in 1927.



After a couple of weeks in Cambridge, Aiken took Lowry with him to stay in South Yarmouth, Cape Cod where Dolly lived. Dolly was the step-daughter of Charles D. Voorhis, an old friend of Aiken's.



Lowry's first biographer Douglas Day paints an idyllic picture of Lowry and Dolly going for long walks on the beach, reading poetry and painting as well as visiting the theatre in Boston with Lowry staying over at Dolly's house. This picture is based on the archives of Conrad Knickerbocker who was an early researcher of Lowry's life. Knickerbocker's archive contained letters from Dolly to Knickerbocker in the early 60's.

Day claims that this was Lowry's first proper love affair. This claim was before documentary evidence emerged in the form of two letters from Tess Evans that she and Lowry had been close before Lowry embarked on his sea voyage to the Far East in 1927. When Day wrote his biography, he thought that the character Janet in Ultramarine was a Lowryean fantasy but in actuality the character Janet was based on Tess.



However, according to Lowry's later biographer Gordon Bowker, Dolly says in interviews that she was not smitten with Lowry and found him a nuisance. Either way, both biographers detail that Lowry wrote to her from on-board the SS Cedric on the way home to England.

How much Lowry was in love with Dolly is debatable with Lowry adopting an absurd tone of affection in the letter which couldn't possibly be serious. You can read the full acount in Bowker's Pursued By Furies Pgs. 89-90. The only letter to have been published between Lowry and Dolly is the fragment contained in The Collected Letters Of Malcolm Lowry Volume 1. Day and Bowker elude to a much longer letter written on board the Cedric and perhaps other correspondence.



Lowry did meet Dolly again in 1934, when he visited the Cape Cod area with his first wife Jan Gabrial. Bowker tells the amusing story of Lowry calling Dolly from Provincetown, where he was staying on the trip, inviting Dolly over to meet him and Jan. When Dolly arrived, Jan was absent and she found Lowry drunk on the floor with sheet music for the song "My Dolly" open on the piano. I can only assume that song was the Vincent Youmans classic which I was unable to find but I thought the YouTube video below might suffice to go with whatever was going around Lowry's head! Tea For Two, from the 1925 musical, No No Nanette. Song by Irving Caesar and Vincent Youmans; performed by Helen Clark and Lewis James.



I was intrigued about Dolly and wondered whether she continued with her painting. This is what I discovered:

Artist and environmentalist, Doris ("Dolly") L. Lewis (Henriquez) divided her life among Massachusetts, the Caribbean, and South Florida. Her paternal grandparents descended from old New England families and built a house on Boston's Marlborough Street when the Back Bay neighborhood first opened. Later, some of the family moved to Cambridge, where several in-laws had lived for many years; one had married Longfellow's artist son, Ernest.



On her mother's side, Lewis descended from the prominent "Anglo" Lindo family of Jamaica and Costa Rica. Her grandfather was one of the eight partners of Lindo Brothers, members of which owned extensive plantations for coffee, bananas, and sugar in Jamaica and Costa Rica, as well as the J. Wray rum company, the Daniel Finzi wine and spirit business, and properties on Jamaica's north coast that later were developed into resorts. They also founded the Bank of Costa Rica.

Born in 1909 at the Cecil Lindo (her great uncle) Historic House on Parque Morazan in San Jose, Costa Rica, Lewis returned to a family plantation "El Sitio" at Juan Vinas, with her father, Sidney Lewis (of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and her mother, Daisy ("Mimi") Lindo Lewis (later Voorhis). For a few years just before and during World War I, Sidney Lewis ran mining interests out of Wheeling, West Virginia, but decided to return to Costa Rica in 1919 when his daughter was ten. The family stopped in New York on the way, staying with Doris Lewis's grandfather, August Lindo, on Park Avenue. Before embarking, her father traveled alone to Cambridge to visit his mother for a few days and suddenly died, perhaps a victim of the flu epidemic. After her father's death, Lewis was taken by her mother to live with members of the Lindo family in Jamaica for one year, possibly at her great uncle Robert's plantation, "Sunnyside," two miles outside of Linstead.



Then Lewis and her mother migrated to Cambridge to live near her father's family. In the Boston area she attended the Buckingham School, the May School, and the Museum School. Summering on Cape Cod from the late 1920’s and moving to South Yarmouth about 1934, Lewis at a young age became associated with a group of New York, Boston, and Cape Cod artists and writers, including Van Gogh's acquaintance Dodge McKnight (friend of Isabella Steward Gardner), poet Conrad Aiken, and novelist Malcolm Lowry. Lowry wrote perhaps his most famous letter to her—a 30-page love letter, which remains in her family.

Other artists who were close associates were Howard Gibbs (whose first-class "Still Life" Lewis owned), Harold Dunbar (who painted her portrait, and she, one of him), Byron Thomas (whose famous "The Skater" she owned), Frederick Wight (later associated with UCLA), and Alice Stallknecht (who did two portraits of her). For over sixty years Lewis was a close friend of Catherine Huntington, who owned the Provincetown Playhouse and kept Eugene O'Neill's plays alive during the 1940's. She also painted Huntington's portrait.

On Cape Cod Doris Lewis at first painted typical Cape landscapes in oil, which exhibited in Cambridge in the early 30's. But at the same time she produced a strong body of modernist surrealistic oils, which exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and other locations. She also painted in New York and Boston.



Through her mother's family, Lewis maintained keen interest in the Caribbean, and in 1937 married Anglo-Jamaican Edward Henriquez in Havana, where she spent the next twelve years. Henriquez had been educated at Belmont Hill School, founded partially for him and his brother by the Atkins family, who had extensive sugar holdings in Cuba and land in Belmont outside Boston. An "Anglo" herself, Lewis—unlike many North Americans—showed great interest in and love for both native peoples, Cuban Hispanics and Blacks.

Briefly in the late 1930's—when her husband's sailboat was being built—Lewis lived under primitive conditions among Afro-Cuban sugarcane workers some distance from the cultivation of Havana. During the day the men toiled in the fields, and Lewis was struck by the spiritual faces of the women and children left at home—especially by their long-suffering and innocence. The only art materials she had with her were conte pencils and a sketchpad. And so were born 25 character-full portraits in an exhibit, "Faces of Afro Cuba," which showed posthumously at the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill in 1996.



In 1949 Lewis returned to the States to live in Florida for the rest of her life. There, in addition to pursuing her own artwork in hard-edge oils and in pottery, she personally encouraged countless artists, potters, and gardeners, as well as serving on various county- and state-wide boards and founding the Ceramic League of Palm Beach County. She also performed a busy, vocal, and courageous role in Florida's environmental affairs and is credited as one of the leading activists to save the Everglades. She died in 1995 at her home in West Palm Beach.JAMES R. BAKKER ANTIQUES, INC


As ever with Lowry there is an ironic touch in the above which I enjoyed. The fact Dolly came from a family who owned rum distillers would have surely made her interesting to Lowry even if they had to drink bootleg booze due to prohibition. Dolly also painted the picture below called Circus which includes a ferris wheel which was such a potent symbol in Lowry's Under The Volcano. Dolly painted Circus in 1939 just as Lowry was struggling with the first drafts of Under The Volcano.



One of the reasons why I was intrigued by Dolly was after reading Lowry's letter to Conrad Aiken on 24 April 1931 which included the following about Dolly:

Thank God Dolly's got a job. I was thinking last night of her saying - I'm so excited you GNAW, I must always get a little bit aTIPSY you GNAW MRS CHERRY MRS CHERRY oh I'm so excited you GNAW. Jesus bloody christ I was nearly sick when I thought of her - I wonder why she knocked at my door the last night all the same-

We will never know the true extent of their relationship but perhaps Lowry invited her over to his temporary Provincetown home to find out why she knocked on the door and then got too drunk.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

I am currently re-reading Lowry's Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid and came across Lowry's reference to the above song. Lowry's alter-ego Sigbjorn Wilderness lies in bed in Cuernavaca:

"It was still quite early, early enough, he thought, waking slightly more, for the sounds of the party, the posada, still to be going on next door, or over the barranca, wherever it was: the clarinet soared. "Smoke gets in you eyes," (I'll say it does.)The clarinetist had made quite a good break; it was as significant tune, had, indeed been Ruth's (Lowry's first wife Jan Gabrial)favourite tune..."

Jan Gabrial probably liked the song by Irene Dunne who sang the song in the 1935 film adaptation of the original Broadway play for which the song was written by Jerome Kern. I would think that Lowry would have preferred Tommy Dorsey's version which is nearer in spirit to the version of the song Wilderness hears in Cuernavaca.




Here I am reading Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid in Jeake's House, the former home of Lowry's mentor and friend Conrad Aiken in Rye, Sussex. I am currently preparing a post on my recent visit with my wife Barbara to Ripe, Chalvington and Rye in pursuit of Lowry's spirit.

Conrad Aiken Interview Paris Review 1968

I just came across a copy of an interview on the Net originally given by Conrad Aiken to the Paris Review in 1968. There are many references to Lowry in the interview.

The painting above is Edward Burra's John Deth(Homage To Conrad Aiken)1930. This painting must date from when Conrad Aiken returned to Rye, Sussex to mentor Lowry while Lowry was at Cambridge. Burra, who by all accounts had a fraught relationship with Lowry, would have met Malc in Rye in late 1930. I wonder whether Malc is featured in Burra's painting?

In a later post, I will return to Burra and his love of jazz which would have at least given him some connection with Malc.

Starevich's The Portrait 1915

Lowry held Gogol in high regard, as shown in a letter to Conrad Aiken in late February 1940, where Lowry used the Russian writer as a benchmark to compare the quality of his own work against in particular Under The Volcano which was still in draft in 1940.

I came across the above film version of the Gogol short story The Portrait while researching films for posts on the Cambridge Film Guild 1929/30 season. The film was directed by Russian filmmaker Vladislav Starevich best remembered as a pioneer of puppet animation.