Whatever one thinks of John Betjeman, and I do feel that he may have been a little overpraised as part of an understandable backlash against the obscurantist excesses of modernism, you have to admit that he wrote the kind of poems that no one else wrote, and that is always a good start. Indeed, I would be hard put myself to say exactly what kind of poem this one is. Comic? Mock heroic? With something of the old music-halls about it? (For some reason I seem to hear it in my head being recited in a sort of ‘Albert and the Lion’ voice). Whatever the case, I like its jaunty quirkiness, though the tale of the real Matthew Webb (1848-1883), who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel with no artifical aids, was a rather sad one. He tried hard to capitalise on the fame accrued from his channel-crossing feat, competing in endurance swimming championships and giving various aquatic exhibitions, but he swam a sedate breast-stroke and there was a limit to how long people wanted to watch him doing rather slow lengths in public baths for hours on end. Finally he was driven to attempt the fairly impossible feat of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. His body was never found. As a pathetic footnote, his wife Madeline never did accept that so strong a swimmer could have simply drowned, and looked for his return for years after.

Note: Webb was born at Dawley, now part of Telford, in Shropshire, and learned to swim in the River Severn at Coalbrookdale. The title, of course, is a nod to A.E.Housman’s first collection of poems.

A Shropshire Lad
 
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn,
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along –
Swimming along –
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.

The sun shone low on the railway line
And over the bricks and stacks
And in at the upstairs windows
Of the Dawley houses’ backs
When we saw the ghost of Captain Webb,
Webb in a water sheeting,
Come dripping along in a bathing dress
To the Saturday evening meeting.
Dripping along –
Dripping along –
To the Congregational Hall;
Dripping and still he rose over the sill and faded away in a wall.

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carries the bricks to Lawley.
Rigid and dead –
Rigid and dead –
To the Saturday congregation,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination.

John Betjeman