Poems, stories and sketches kept as a personal record of his creative output by the wealthy ex-patriate Australian businessman, publisher and neighbour of Virginia Woolf and Hillaire Belloc in the Sussex village of Rodmell.
James Murray Allison (1877-1929) was born in Melbourne, left Australia in 1908, managed advertising for The Times (he wrote a book about advertising) before acquiring the journal Land and Water which achieved great success during the war, published 5 volumes of verse, short stories and a posthumous novel which was edited by Hillaire Belloc after his untimely death.
Allison has repurposed the binding of a volume of the History of the Great War, having it bound up with blank card leaves which he used to mount his typescript and manuscript poems. Marbled endpapers; a sketch of a woman’s face on first flyleaf. The manuscript is paginated through to 142 with a further 20 blanks; there are stubs scattered throughout where Allison has removed items at pp31-33; 41-2; 58-60; 65; 82; 102; 104-112; 124-5; 136, leaving about 120 pages of mostly typescript material, annotated by hand and mounted on the rectos with occasional additions and notes to the versos which bring the page count to about 140 in total plus a further 6 pages of manuscript entries. At the end is a 10 page typed title index which is preceded by a couple more sketches. Allison has annotated the index to indicate which of these poems appeared in his published volume, Poems about Birds. Laid in is a four page obituary from the London Mercury published in July 1929.
Broadly the material is divided between Allison’s writings about his youth in Australia, his publishing life and patronage of his Sussex neighbour Hillaire Belloc, his experiences around his home in rural Sussex at Rodmell, and time spent travelling, notably to Paris and Canada.
The first item is a short story of Australian memories of ‘working for a storekeeper at Wallgett...’ which allows Allison to record the song he heard sung in a drover’s camp: ‘Now gather round, ye Drovers,/ Musterers and Swagsmen,/ rouseabout and Ringers, too. Spillers, Touts, and Bagsmen...’ This runs to 26 verses and choruses (1920). Other Australian verses include ‘A Bush Argument’ (p19) and ‘Six men sat in a tin hut upon the plains/ in Queensland... A many drop of rain hit the tin/ Roof with the impact of a bullet...’ Allison met his neighbour Hillaire Belloc in 1914 and commissioned him to write for the journal that Allison controlled, Land and Water. Belloc’s presence is felt throughout the volume, notably in ‘Hells Bells, Mr Wells’ on a dispute between Wells and Belloc (April 1921) and in a poem addressed to Belloc: ‘The Port of Newhaven. To H.B.’ with manuscript corrections (p11). Allison’s role as a publisher is explored in several poems, including a particularly effective anatomy of the contributions to his magazines: ‘Miss Sackville West gets sixty words, but Mr Walter de la Mare/ Enjoys just over sixteen lines... And so we come to “Science”, and needless thus to mention/ There’s Einstein. Relativity and the good old Fourth Dimension.’ Life in Rodmell is recorded in neo-Georgian verse in poems such as ‘Dusk on the Downs’ (Rodmell, May 1921) and a long descriptive poems ‘Upon my farm in Sussex, near the Downs.... Just underneath the hillside,/ I have a little house....’ In similar vein are ‘The Brooks at Rodmell’ and ‘The South Downs are Calling’. Allison’s wealth allowed him to travel extensively with a sequence of poems written in Canada in 1921 beginning with ‘The Moose’, a long, affectionate manuscript poem to his son and ending with his ‘Lines on leaving U.S.A., 1921’. One of the strangest poems in the manuscript is a sort of indictment of post-war Paris and its multi-ethnic lost generation residents in the early 1920s. Though Hillaire Belloc’s influence is easy to see in this volume, we can find no reference to Virginia Woolf.
