West End Extra - Letters: MacNeice

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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 12 October 2007

Memories of Louis MacNeice

• DAN Carrier’s articles on the poet Louis MacNeice (Review, September 22 and 29) jogged my memory.
I was a friend of the late Welsh poet John Tripp (The Province of Belief, The Inheritance File, Collected Poems 1976 and Penguin Modern Poets).
He worked for MacNeice at the BBC in the 1950s where he had a junior position, and he describes his experience vividly in the poem Louis MacNeice in the Cock, which appears in Passing Through (published in the Poetry Wales Press, 1984).
The entire poem appears in one of the above collections, but here is a taster:

Everything about him was dark:
he wore a black leather coat
standing alone at the bar
like a rich romantic French actor
or a matador taking his ease.
I hoped Auden would come in from New York
To break his silence, making
A double flash of glamour
Among the clerks and tartan panels.

The Cock Tavern was a watering hole for the old Beeb hacks long ago and was frequented by Tripp. JT died in 1986. He was a good friend of Danny Abse – both supported Cardiff City.
Tripp told me that, when he was in the Cock, if Cardiff did well the great man would send him over an Irish whiskey from the saloon, but there was a ‘divide’ and JT knew his place!
Jack Courtney O’Connor
via email

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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