The Poetry of Linden Huddlestone

One use of the internet is looking up people from one's past, finding out what they are doing now or what they have done. People from school or previous jobs. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don't. It was a while ago that I first found reference to Linden Huddlestone, who taught English at our school, but only this week that I found a booklet entitled 'Cheltenham Poets' edited by him. For £8 or so, it was worth a gamble that he had included a piece or two of his own so I ordered it.
LCH would have been in his forties in 1971 when this booklet was published and when I started at Sir Thomas Rich's School, Gloucester. An austere figure to first formers with the scent of pipe smoke about him and ageing, boney appearance, prominent Adam's apple and slightly pedantic air, it wasn't until the sixth form that we appreciated a sense of humour and more bohemian spirit in him. He sang in the choir and played croquet with the music and history teachers, Rangeley and Thomas.
Google research reveals that LCH wrote a thesis on poet and novelist Charles Williams for his M.A. at London University in 1952. Williams is an unfamiliar name now but there is a society that meets to discuss and promote his work, http://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/index.html. This thesis helped him provide a bibliography for a book on Williams by John Heath-Stubbs published in 1955.
The Arthurian legends are the subject of much of Williams' work. From the evidence of what he chose to teach us, LCH's interest in contemporary poetry included David Jones, the modernist second world war poet, and Ted Hughes. I saw him at the Hughes reading at the Cheltenham Festival in 1977.
So, finding a booklet of poetry by the Cheltenham Poetry Society, it was interesting to find which of these influenced his own writing.
The two Huddlestone poems in the book are 'from Taliessin on Snowdon' and With a Looking Glass. The first is an extended extract from a longer Arthurian work desribing the return of King Arthur's court poet to Wales. It is unrhymed and atmospheric and depends on a series of internal rhymes for an effect of surging forward motion,

Despair in the brow bent to ascent of the hill,

A note beneath the extract explains that it recalls a passage in Wordsworth's Prelude about a visit to Snowdon.
The second piece is a six-line prayer, neat and simple, possibly addressed to his wife,

With a Looking Glass

Many times you look here,
Questioning or neatening
Brown or greying strand of hair:
Beyond, over your shoulder,
In one room or another,
But at one, may he be there.

So, just two poems is a tantalising glimpse into the poetic output of the teacher who introduced us to Ted Hughes. Abebooks doesn't find any slim volume he left behind and the Cheltenham Poetry Society's website admits they don't know much about their own history so two Huddlestone poems might be all I ever find. But you never know.