Appreciation of late poet James Kirkup

Dorothy, who lives in Whitburn, says she is cataloguing all his work which is in the care of the South Shields museum and the library.

Like Morpeth-based publisher Sheila Wakefield and others, she feels he is not recognised as he should be on home turf even though he is renowned worldwide as a poet.

Dorothy was training to be a teacher in Doncaster when she first studied the work of James Kirkup - his poems and volumes of autobiography - and appreciated his references to South Shields which she felt were spot on.

She laughs at the discrepencies in his published biographical details. For instance, it is now known that he was born in 1918 yet a biography written years ago and kept in the archives of The Journal puts his birth year as 1923.

"He always took five years off because he was a conscientious objector in the war," explains Dorothy. Those years, he argued, marked a hiatus in his life.

She confirms the view that he was an outsider, saying that he was bullied at school for being different. But she says he was a kind and gentle man who never lost his affection for the North East even though he didn't live here for most of his life.

She regrets the attention given to the blasphemy case (brought by Mary Whitehouse in 1977 against The Gay News and its editor for publishing one of James Kirkup's poems) which, she says, was one small episode of his life.

What most people might not realise, she says, is that he wrote many Christian poems during his lifetime and this one, in any case, was misconstrued.

In the 1970s Dorothy made a cine-film with James Kirkup in South Shields based on his autobiographical work The Only Child.

"He always liked to do the unexpected," she says.

Arguably this trait helped him become a writer of distinction. He certainly won many awards and, in 1962, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.