Fording the Humber

FORDING THE HUMBER

Dad said a bowler-hatted gentleman
in 1953 had traced a path
across the River Humber, two wet miles.
Dad was a trainee minister in Brough
in the mid-fifties. Was he an eyewitness
of the flamboyant lord’s achievement? Was this
old news that went on yielding stones for sermons
in his day? Since then, a few feet have trod
the Roman path the peer inferred amid
prevailing depths. And in another distance
the bridge’s towers scare you with their height.

I wrote the poem for a 2022 competition on the theme of byways. I don’t know why that theme stirred half-memories of my father’s recollection, which I must have heard five or six decades earlier. Dad died in 2011.

Revising my memories for the competition entry, I found that the man who’d forded the Humber was Rufus Alexander, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham (1917-1980). He was invalided out of World War 2 and became a forces lecturer. Other day jobs he held were as radio producer and co-editor of Farmers’ weekly.

His book Westminster wader (1957) has much stream-of-consciousness writing and many overlaid visions of places at different times in history and prehistory. And accounts of his wadings in the Thames and the Severn.

The Aylsham of his peerage title is in Norfolk and he lived in Essex. He was therefore on what is now East Anglia bylines‘s patch.

And I, since 2021, have been a member of East Anglia bylines's editorial team. It seemed to me that the achievement of a man from our patch, in its 70th anniversary year, was worth an article.

The article I wrote was a diary of the brief cycle tour that Clare and I made in April 2023, from Woodall in South Yorkshire to Brough near Hull. And my peers allowed me to get away with including the poem in it.

If you don't already support the Bylines network of publications -- you should. They carry river information far more important than who's walked through the Humber.