Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (21 August 1860 – 7 February 1944) was an English clergyman and a Uranian poet and writer of stories, articles and sermons. His prolific verse celebrating the high spiritual status of love between men and boys was remarkably well-received and favourably reviewed in his lifetime.
Life
Early life and education
Edwin Emmanuel Bradford was the eighth and youngest child of precious metal worker Edwin Greenslade Bradford, who had a business on the Strand in Torquay, and Maria Wellman. His mother died in 1873 when he was twelve or thirteen. The next year his father, much altered since his wife's death, committed suicide. The young Bradford attended Castle College, a high-class preparatory school in Torquay, and matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1881. He was awarded a Third Class honours B.A. in Theology in 1884, an M.A. in 1901, a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1904 and, for a thesis arguing that Saint Paul contradicts himself on the subject of free will, a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1912.
Church appointments
thumb|Holy Trinity, [[Nordelph, where Bradford was vicar from 1909 to 1944]]
Appointed deacon in 1884, Bradford was ordained as a priest the following year. He served curacies at High Ongar (1884-6) and Walthamstow (St Saviour's, 1887), was assistant chaplain to the English church in Saint Petersburg, Russia (1887-9)
Back in England he was curate at Eton (1899-1905) and Upwell (Christchurch, 1905-9) before being appointed, on the nomination of Christchurch rector Charles Francis Townley, vicar of Holy Trinity church in the small country parish of Nordelph, Norfolk in 1909. He played the organ himself. Next to the vicarage he had the village boys dig out a swimming pool and pile the soil in the form of small mountains, to recreate his impression of Switzerland during a visit. He allowed his goats to graze around, placed statuettes of lions around the pool and was able to contemplate the young swimmers from his house. The vicarage was hung with many pictures, including reproductions of works by Henry Scott Tuke and a reproduction of The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower by John Everett Millais. He remained unmarried and lived at the Nordelph vicarage with at least two successive housekeepers until his death in 1944, bequeathing his effects to his last housekeeper, Sarah Esther Beales. His death took place at the vicarage and he was buried in Nordelph.
Soil subsidence was a constant problem in Nordelph, and the vicarage was propped up already in Bradford's time. The church, having become structurally unsafe, was demolished in 2010.
Early in life Bradford was an Anglo-Catholic, but he subsequently became a Modernist, albeit one who liked ritual. In his poetry and elsewhere he made clear his opposition to drinking and gambling.
Social circle
Bradford was a lifelong friend of poet and priest Samuel Elsworth Cottam, with whom he had been an undergraduate classmate and who he had met again at the Anglican church in Paris, where they were both curates. Bradford's friends and acquaintances, often found in Uranian circles, further included Edward Carpenter, George Cecil Ives, John Leslie Barford ("Philebus"), Leonard Henry Green, Horatio Brown, John Betjeman and W. H. Auden. Betjeman stated in a footnote to his poem "A Shropshire Lad" that its opening line, "The gas was on in the Institute," was derived from a line in Bradford's novel in verse Boyhood. Auden referenced Bradford and Bradford's friend Cottam in his long poem "Letter to Lord Byron": "The most I ask is leave to share a pew / With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do".
Writings
Poetry
thumb|Pages from The Romance of Youth and Other Poems (1920)
The most prolific of Uranian authors, Bradford was principally a poet. Between 1908 and 1930 twelve collections of his poetry were published by Kegan Paul in London. The first collection, with a print run of five hundred copies, was financed by Bradford, subsequent volumes paying their way.
In 2021, Bradford's own copies of his poetry books were acquired for the library of his alma mater, Exeter College. They contain his copious handwritten notes, including copied comments from admirers or critics which demonstrate the closeness of the Uranian circle. Some of Bradford's notes are in a private code as yet uncracked.
Themes
Extolling the high spiritual status of romantic love between men and boys, Bradford advocates a new chivalry that transcends boundaries of class;
However, this interpretation of beauty and love as linked to the divine does not lead him to reject the physical in favour of an exclusively spiritual love: "The mere word "carnal" shall not me affright; / Nor will I cease, in Puritans' despite, / To love the boyish body with the sprite, / And hymn it too." Moreover, rather than expressing abstracted reflection, Bradford's "poetry of action" often describes concrete events and dramatic situations. This goes so far as to include the frequent use of personal names, the poems describing the narrator's dealings with a myriad of boys such as Eddie Worth, Merrivale White, Leslie de Lampton, Clinton Fane, Merivale Trelawney Bates, Steve Ailwyn, Our Jack, Will, Eric, Aubrey, Silvester, Joe and Jim, and so on.
The atmosphere of his poetry ranges from vigorous, cheerful Edwardian charm, described as "Hinge and Bracket meet John Betjeman", to sensuous poetry reminiscent of "the languid, sun-drenched style of the painter Henry Scott Tuke".
Bradford's insistence on boy love as the highest form of love, and his deprecation of things female, at times led to the charge of misogyny, as when a reviewer of his collection Passing the Love of Women, irked in particular by the lines "we damn ourselves if we condemn her, / She is but meaner man", wrote: "The tenor of the verses as a whole is to denounce the "love of women," and from a perfectly honest belief in their inferiority. It seems to me now to be "up to" some feminist poet to reply." Bradford sought to defend himself against such criticisms by penning the poem "No Misogynist". However, Betjeman appreciated the poet, whom he visited in Nordelph. Lamenting that Bradford's poetry never made it into anthologies, he made an effort to popularise it and anthologised the poem "Paddy Maloy". Betjeman's friend George Alfred Kolkhorst collected Bradford's work. The writer Dorothy L. Sayers, whose father was vicar of Christchurch near Nordelph, called Bradford "an entertaining little crank—and rather a dear", though finding his collections Passing the Love of Women and The New Chivalry unreadable. S. E. Cottam's volume of poetry Cameos of Boyhood (1930) was noticeably imitative of Bradford's verse and delighted the latter: "I nearly always find books of verse unreadably dull. Yours is a complete exception."
Among later commentators on Bradford's poetry, Timothy d'Arch Smith considered that his "ideas were superior to his poetical abilities, but he had a good sense of rhythm and ... his verses rattle along in a breezy, unself-conscious, style". Michael Matthew Kaylor believed that in the course of his two-decade career as a published poet, Bradford had not revealed "any improvement, stylistically or conceptually". Rictor Norton recommended Bradford's poems of "leaping, rollicking freedom" to readers with "a penchant for good old-fashioned apple pandowdy like auntie used to make". Chatterbox and The Boy's Own Paper. and stories. One tale set in Russia, originally printed in The Boy's Own Paper in 1893, was posthumously published in a limited edition by Timothy d'Arch Smith (Boris Orloff: A Christmas Yarn, 1968). It is a sentimental tale of the friendship between two lads, the narrator and Arthur, the son of a Yorkshire vicar. To Arthur's distress, the narrator is obliged to go live in Russia, where he becomes friends with a wild little Russian boy, Boris Orloff, who reminds him of his English chum.
Bradford also published a collection of sermons discussing the human character and humility (Sermon Sketches for the Sundays of the Christian Year, 1907).
Publications
- Sermon Sketches for the Sundays of the Christian Year: Being Fifty-seven Outline Sermons on Texts Taken from the Sunday Epistles Or Gospels, Together with Addresses for Christmas Day and Good Friday (London: Skeffington & Son, 1907) (HaithiTrust e-book)
- Sonnets Songs & Ballads (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1908, pp. 127) (HaithiTrust e-book)
- Stories of Life at Our Great Public Schools (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1908)
- Passing the Love of Women and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1913, pp. 143)
- In Quest of Love and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1914, pp. 109) (HaithiTrust e-book)
- Lays of Love and Life (London: Kegan Paul, 1916, pp. 163) (HaithiTrust e-book)
- The New Chivalry and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1918, pp. 160)
- The Romance of Youth and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1920, pp. vi, 86) (Archive.org e-book)
- Ralph Rawdon: a Story in Verse (London: Kegan Paul, 1922, pp. vi, 115)
- The True Aristocracy (London: Kegan Paul, 1923, pp. vii, 116)
- The Tree of Knowledge (London: Kegan Paul, 1925, pp. vii, 111)
- The Kingdom Within You and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1927, pp. v, 64)
- Strangers and Pilgrims (London: Kegan Paul, 1929, pp. vi, 115)
- Boyhood (London: Kegan Paul, 1930, pp. ix, 91)
- Boris Orloff: A Christmas Yarn (Stoke Ferry, Norfolk: Daedalus Press, 1968; limited edition by Timothy d'Arch Smith of 220 copies plus 10 copies on Japanese paper lettered A to J)
- To Boys Unknown. Poems by Rev. E. E. Bradford (London: Gay Men's Press, 1988; introduced and selected by Paul I. Webb, pp. 77)
- My Love Is Like All Lovely Things. Selected Poems of E. E. Bradford (London: Arcadian Dreams, 2023; selected, with an essay on the poet's life and work, by C. Caunter, pp. 323)
Further reading
See also
- Homoerotic poetry