My thanks to Keith Bosley (1937-2018) for letting me have a copy of his poem of a visit he made to Horbury over half a century ago.
In Memory of William Baines
(1899-1922)
Is this the church we asked the caretaker where there is a plaque to William Baines? It is, he said. We had travelled north all day to Yorkshire, to smell and taste the soot of Wakefield, to see the pitheads, the slagheaps the houses facing two grey ways at once, to hear people with grit on their tongues giving a civil answer a guarded edge: we had come to find what was left of a boy in the village where he lived fifty years ago - this stern suburb, Horbury hugging the hillside above the city. We had read old journals proclaiming his debt to Debussy and Skryabin (the sea and the fire) calling him a genius and reporting his death at the age of twenty-three: we had met distant relatives who told of meagre schooling of work with his father playing in the picture palace and the Primltive Methodist chapel and of consumption and poverty that kept him in the garden shed till the hospital at York could do nothing for him. We had studied tattered scores long out of print from Paradise Gardens where he walked at sunset to Pool-Lights, whose last phrase rises to silence taking his bearings meanwhile from his own Flamboro' Head and sailing out alone beyond the beacons where no one was to follow. This is William Baines but the caretaker unlocked the door and showed us into gloom. Upstairs he sald. We trod, fingered grime and there it was with laurels and flaming torches carved in oak an inscription in the taste of the time and at the bottom a scroll in bronze with a piano Prelude engraved in full chosen for its brevity and because they called it the Amen Prelude. He fetched us a triptych of photographs from the organ loft: - a printed title page with two corners turned down and shaded - a dark young man with plain strong features creased down the middle - A page of manuscript marked Labyrinth a deep sea cave. Call him up, call him back from the lonely places: here in his England his Yorkshire where men have died for a hard living let this fiftieth autumn flare in his honour, for here is small treasure, here is filigree of iron. Keith Bosley
