32, Devonshire Road

32, Devonshire Road, Claughton, Birkenhead: the childhood home of A.S.J. Tessimond.

Tessimond's parents, George and Amy, married in West Derby, Liverpool in 1885. Though the unfamiliar family name perhaps suggests some foreign origin, it seems most likely that it is a derivation of the English surname Tesseyman.They were a local couple; George was the son of an iron foundry owner who in 1871 was employing a staff of 20 men and 10 boys. George then worked as a bank branch inspector, and by 1901 the couple had moved to the solid, elegant, semi-detatched villa in Devonshire Road, Birkenhead. Though Hubert Nicholson states that he was an only child, the 1901 census records that the couple had a daughter before him: Lillian C. Tessimond, who would have been 15 when the poet was born. The relative grandeur of the house indicates that the family at this time were materially comfortable, indeed in 1938 his mother must have had sufficient wealth to have made a generous donation of £5 to the 'Lord Baldwin Appeal on behalf of the victims of religious, racial and political persecution'.* They lived in the house with George’s sister Elizabeth employing two members of staff. Nicholson mentions that as a child the poet ‘relied for human warmth on a kindly old aunt. (She lived to ninety, and left him some money.)’ and it is possible that this was Elizabeth.

Houses

People who are afraid of themselves
Multiply themselves into families
And so divide themselves
And so become less afraid.

People who might have to go out
Into clanging strangers’ laughter,
Crowd under roofs, make compacts
To no more than smile at each other.

People who might meet their own faces
Or surprise their own voices in doorways
Build themselves rooms without mirrors
And live between walls without echoes.

People who might meet other faces
And unknown voices round corners
Build themselves rooms all mirrors
And live between walls all echoes.

People who are afraid to go naked
Clothe themselves in families, houses,
But are still afraid of death
Because death one day will undress them.

*Times, Thursday, Dec 15, 1938.

 

Comments

[Kevin]

Do you think that this poem is intended to speak specifically of Tessimond's own experience of family, or more generally of his feelings on all families?

[JRWB]

That's a very good, but a very big question. Certainly it's tempting to read this as specific to Tessimond's own family circumstance, but we do have to be careful. At this stage almost nothing is known about his childhood, to the point that his close friend and literary executor was seemingly unaware of his sister's existence (though we might assume she left 32, Devonshire Road soon after the poet's birth).

What this poem is saying about families is more generalised than relating to just the Tessimonds. 'People', 'houses', 'families', are all terms that imply that this is a common problem, not common to everyone, but that there is a type of person who diffuses their self amongst others in order to not have to face up to their fear of who they are. Is this what George and Amy did? Well, possibly... but the real answer is that we just don’t know. Even with more of an impression of what went on at Devonshire Road, we cannot really say that this is what his parents were doing.

I’m intending at some point (after this celebration is over) to go and look at Hubert Nicholson’s papers to see if any more light can be shed on Tessimond’s life from those. There were also 105 copies of a short pamphlet on the poet’s later life published by the artist Frances Richards in 1979. The background is all very intriguing – I’d be fascinated to know more about his mother’s donation to the Lord Baldwin Fund; £5 stands as a very large private bequest. How did this potentially politically motivated act square with the poet’s dodging of conscription a few years later?

All of this is a side issue to the poem itself. The poem is there to express a view, one of loneliness within families, within houses, but ultimately loneliness brought by a separation from who the individual is themselves. Though it may have been what Tessimond felt about his own family, it’s something that exists beyond that circumstance, and though perhaps not universal, is shared no doubt by a great many people.

[SG]

the poet was hospitalised for hiccups - thus he 'dodged' conscription.

he was fond of his cousins- enough to dedicate poems to them.