Lord Noel-Buxton

 LORD NOEL-BUXTON

who found fame in tracing shallow paths across great rivers

Lord Noel-Buxton was a peer
who forded rivers with no fear
and fashioned chapter ends as though
doing it on the radio.

Water-writ fame! His Humber ford,
not on Brough Haven's tourist board,
yet inspires track of his designs
by bridge and in East Anglia Bylines.

This imitation of Hilaire Belloc's cautionary tales (specifically the ones about Lord Lundy and in the 1911 book More peers) was written in connection with an East Anglia bylines article. For EAB's series on the twelve days of Christmas and their gifts, I covered the ten lords a-leaping, and revisited the story of Rufus Alexander Buxton, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham (1917-1980): his life in general, this time, not just how he forded the Humber in 1953. That exploit was followed, from the safety of a bridge, by Clare and me seventy years later. Click on the links for explanations of how Brough Haven's tourist board and doing it on the radio come into it at all.

And of course I reiterate the 2023 plug for the Bylines network of publications.

Citizen science and citizen journalism

Believed,

the pensioner

enjoyed brief fame.

Someone had a video.

Doubt.

Busy, 

the traffic

kills many beasts.

Count those you see.

Understanding.

Disillusioned,

a land 

needs new stories.

Citizen journalism seeks them.

Maps.

Risky.

The firm 

pays its dividend.

Sewage taints its water.

Bacteria.

Thriving,

the company

pays huge bonuses.

But watch its sewers. 

Fines.

Wild,

the starlings

decline in numbers.

But they keep mimicking. 

Life.

The above things represent a form its inventors call Elfchen, from the German for 'eleven'. It's based on a pattern of words rather than of syllables, feet or rhymes. Eleven words, disposed as follows:

1 Word: An adjective

2 Words: A noun with an article

3 Words: An action of the noun

4 Words: Complement the action

1 Word: A noun that closes the story

This whole thing was the brainchild of the 'Storytelling and other arts' working group of the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA). I heard of the project from my scientist wife Clare.

The links in my Elfchen are to stories in East Anglia bylines, a citizen journalism outlet I've been involved with for a couple of years now. The linked stories are not mine, but I hope writing Elfchen about them gives me a vague sort of association with them.

The Elfchen were included by ECSA in their collection Citizen science through poetry, available both as A3 poster and as a foldable booklet. The plan is to share printed copies at the ECSA 2024 conference in Vienna, 3-6 April 2024.

Copied here with ECSA's blessing -- thanks. They ask that everyone use the hashtags

#PoemsForCitSci and #citizenscience

and tag

@eucitsci, when promoting their work on social media. Done!

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.

New words to old tunes

Here are two campaign songs I wrote during 2021 and sang at demonstrations.

The first was in connection with Global Justice Now's campaign for the dropping of patents on vaccinations against Covid19.  The demonstration was outside AstraZeneca's Cambridge premises, during their AGM in May.  The tune is Vaughan Williams' 'King's Lynn', which became for me the signature tune to Lockdown 1 in March 2020.  I wrote an article about the tune's story for the online news outlet East Anglia bylines, and am following that up with explorations of other hymn tunes.

THE ASTRAZENECA SONG




(to the tune King's Lynn)




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their patent free.

It's funded by the taxes

of folk like you and me.

The firm met the occasion

to get the vaccine done.

Now let it be their doing

but not a thing they own.




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their price pledge fair.

We hear what's outsourced to Pune

gets higher prices there.

We hear of countries with three times

their needed vaccines stored,

and others where vaccine's a thing

nobody can afford.




We call on AstraZeneca --

they're short of engineers --

to have more sharing of knowledge

in world health with their peers.

Think COVAX and its makers,

think Salk who long ago

gifted his treatment to the world

and conquered polio.




We call on AstraZeneca

to take Joe Biden's lead

and waive their rights in the vaccine

according to the need.

We see the Covid-19

Technology Access Pool.

We ask big pharma, ask this firm

to let the pool be full.




We call on AstraZeneca

and others in the field

to see more in their drugs than

the profits that they yield,

to listen to the protests

today outside their door.

Poor sort of wealth it is consists

in keeping others poor.



For Cambridge's demonstration on the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, in November, I wrote a song to a tune by the seventeenth-century composer Henry Lawes.  It's a fine, strong, angular tune. The link at the tune's name, below, will take you to its entry in hymnary.org , and you'll find a recording there.  I took it somewhat faster than that at the demo (50’28” in the film).

The song lists the outcomes we hoped for from the COP26 in Glasgow, which was running at the time.

Anyone who can tell me how the tune came by its name will be listened to with great interest.  Farley Castle near Reading was built about two centuries after Henry Lawes' time.  The name might refer to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, which saw action and changed hands during the Civil War.  Was Lawes ever there?  Or was the tune named retrospectively by a hymnbook editor?  Or is there some other story?


COP26, HERE'S WHAT WE WANT TO SEE




to the tune 'Farley Castle' by Henry Lawes 




COP26, here's what we want to see.

Unblock the route to cleaner energy!

Corporate courts must never own the rules!

Cut them away, those harmful bosses' tools!




COP26, wherever oil is found,

coal, fossil gas, let them stay underground.

Earthquakes and fires have been the warning signs --

fund the transition, all who funded mines!




COP26, we want more jubilee!

Debt locks the global south's dependency,

debt saps green work, saps every healthy spend,

some debts are bad and doubtful. Have them end!




COP26, unmake the harm we made,

hold the UK to useful climate aid,

rich countries' reparations and our share,

small to our GDP and only fair.




COP26, write new rules that will bind.

See those with power hurting humankind,

see how their years have left the planet scarred,

hard work to tie them, work to tie them hard!




CC BY-SA 2.0
Arising from campaign demands presented at https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/our-campaigns/climate/

Earlier fruits of my interest in places that have given their names to hymn tunes are my Google Maps list of those in the British Isles and my retextings of 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'.  Another person who shares this interest is Mark Browse, whose book O little town: hymn-tunes and the places that inspired them I strongly recommend.