Born in 1917 as an only child, he grew up in a household dominated for the first seven years of his life by the lingering death of his father who’d been wounded in the First World War. Whilst other prominent twentieth century poets honed their craft in the country’s leading universities, Charles went to Launceston College and, after wartime service in the Royal Navy, trained as a primary teacher in Peterborough.
By the time he died in 2003, aged 86, he’d won a raft of highly prestigious prizes for his poetry, been made a CBE, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Cornish Bard and counted the likes of Ted Hughes as a very good friend. Inspired and inspiring, they provide a lesson for us all.įor someone who lived for the vast majority of his life in Launceston, Charles Causley made a very big impression. Our history is full of men and women who have broken down barriers of class, gender and wealth to prove to the world that anything is possible. In celebration of this important bi-centenary, the Royal Cornwall Museum is telling the story of extraordinary Cornish achievement through new exhibitions, lectures and events. Thousands of objects have been collected and exhibited there – showcasing the outstanding contribution Cornwall has made over the centuries to science and the arts. The Royal Institution of Cornwall (RIC) runs the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Courtney Library – both of them housed in the impressive Grade II listed building in River Street that the RIC has owned since 1919. I went to Singapore to give some readings and I visited the cemetery there where a lot of the British boys had been buried, you know, and I went with a young chap there and he said to me, ‘They’re just kids – they’re so young.’ Awful.Two hundred years ago in 1818, a group of men and women gathered at the County Library in Truro to establish a society of learning and culture that still exists and thrives today. They had tried to make the landscape sort of rather British there – English flowers and all that but it didn’t matter.
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