Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" "Herring Merchants"

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of the summer of 1906 I received a letter from Mr. F. A. Mumby, of the Daily Graphic, asking me if I knew if Joseph Fletcher, the “Posh” of the “FitzGerald” letters, was still alive.  All about me were veterans of eighty, ay, and ninety! hale and garrulous as any longshoreman needs be.  But it had never occurred to me before that possibly the man who was Edward FitzGerald’s “Image of the Mould that Man was originally cast in,” the east coast fisherman for whom the great translator considered no praise to be too high, might be within easy reach.

My first discovery was that to most of the good people of Lowestoft the name of the man who had honoured the town by his preference was unknown.  A solicitor in good practice, a man who is by way of being an author himself, asked me (when I named FitzGerald to him) if I meant that FitzGerald who had, he believed, made a lot of money out of salt!  A schoolmaster had never heard of either FitzGerald or Omar.

It was plain that the educated classes of Lowestoft could help me in my search but little.  So I went down to the harbour basins and the fish wharves, and asked of “Posh” and his “governor.”

Not a jolly boatman of middle age in the harbour but knew of both.  “D’ye mean Joe Fletcher, master?” said one of them.  “What—old Posh?  Why yes!  Alive an’ kickin’, and go a shrimpin’ when the weather serve.  He live up in Chapel Street.  Number tew.  He lodge theer.”

So up I went to Chapel Street, one of those streets in the old North Town of Lowestoft which have seen better days.  A wizened, bent, white-haired old lady answered my knock, after a preliminary inspection from a third-floor window of my appearance.  This, I learnt afterwards, was old Mrs. Capps, with whom Posh had lodged since the death of his wife, fourteen years previously.

“You’ll find him down at the new basin,” said the old lady.  “He’s mostly there this time o’ day.”

But there was no Posh at the new basin.  Half a dozen weather-beaten shrimpers (in their brown jumpers, and with the fringe of hair running beneath the chin from ear to ear—that hirsute ornament so dear to East Anglian fishermen) were lounging about the wharf, or mending the small-meshed trawl-nets wherein they draw what spoil they may from the depleted roads.

All were grizzled, most were over seventy if wrinkled skin and white hair may be taken as signs of age.  And all knew Posh, and (oh! shame to the “educated classes!”) all remembered Edward FitzGerald.  The poet, the lovable, cultured gentleman they knew nothing of.  Had they known of his incomparable paraphrase of the Persian poet, of his scholarship, his intimacy with Thackeray, Tennyson, Carlyle, the famous Thompson, Master of Trinity, they would have recked nothing at all.  But they remembered FitzGerald, who has been called by their superiors an eccentric, miserly hermit.  They remembered him, I say, as a man whose heart was in the right place, as a man who never turned a deaf ear to a tale of trouble.

“Ah!” said one of them.  “He was a good gennleman, was old Fitz.”  (They all spoke of him as “old Fitz.”  They thought of him as a “mate”—as one who knew the sea and her moods, and would put up with her vagaries even as they must do.  His shade in their memories was the shade of a friend, and a friend whom they respected and loved.)  “That was a good day for Posh when he come acrost him.  Posh! I reckon you’ll find him at Bill Harrison’s if he bain’t on the market.”

“Posh” was no fancy name of the poet’s for Joseph Fletcher, but the actual proper cognomen by which the man has been known on the coast since he was a lad.  Most east coast fishermen have a nickname which supersedes their registered name, and “Posh” (or now “old Posh”) was Joseph Fletcher’s....