Deryck Cumming

This booklet was published posthumously in 1977 (https://archive.org/details/isbn_0905917006/page/36/mode/2up).

Contents of the final page:

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Deryck Cumming was born in Middlesex in 1944 and grew up in Ruislip. He read English at the University of Durham, graduating in 1966. While a student he was an active member of the Durham University Dramatic Society, and wrote both plays and poems. It was as a poet that he entered a literary competition organized by the North East Arts Association (now Northern Arts) in 1966 for poets and prose writers living in the North East, and he shared the first prize of £1000 with the novelist Herbert Sutherland. After receiving his B.A., he began work on an M.A. thesis dealing with the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, and he completed this in Africa while a Lecturer in English at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland from 1968 to 1970. After returning to Britain, he spent a year in the Extra-Mural Department of Glasgow University before moving to Hereford as W.E.A. Tutor-Organizer for Herefordshire and Shropshire. He was killed in a road accident in February 1976. At the time of his death he was putting the finishing touches to his Ph.D, thesis on the major Victorian poet, Swinburne. He was married with two children.

The poems in this booklet were written between 1966 and the time of his death, and are probably the ones that he would have most wanted to preserve from his output. The poems have been edited and prepared for publication from the poet's manuscripts by Gillian Cumming and Peter Lewis. The title of the booklet was suggested by Geoffrey Tomlinson.

Since the judges of the N.E.A.A. literary competition in 1966, the late Sir Herbert Read and John Braine, singled out 'Fetching a Body During Visiting Hours' for special praise, it is worth reproducing Deryck Cumming's own note on the poem found among his papers:

It is based on my own experiences whilst working as a porter in a London hospital where one of my duties was to take bodies from the wards to the mortuary. When a death occurred a great fuss was made about putting up screens so that none of the other patients should see the body being wheeled away. Of course, if the death occurred during visiting hours the chaos was correspondingly increased. Anyway when the screens were in position I seemed to be pushing the trolley with the body on it down a long green tunnel with only the fridge at the other end. The main  point which emerged from such experiences was that death is only significant as it relates to the living or rather as people relate it to themselves. And people only recognize this tacitly. I always felt as though I was sweeping things under the carpet.

Webmaster's Note: On a personal note, in 1976 I was working as a porter at Harefield Hospital. At that time there were two geriatric wards at Harefield and I can confirm Deryck's notes reflect my own experiences.

Webmaster's 2nd Note: My admiration for Deryck has multiplied 10 fold having searched the British Newspaper Archive and discovered that he made the national and local newspapers in 1964 and was suspended from university for a year. My unverified assumption is that Miss Gillian Dawson became Mrs Gillian Cumming.

Published: Tuesday 08 December 1964
Newspaper: Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
They (Deryck Cumming and Gillian Dawson, his fiancée) have been punished because Miss Dawson was absent from her college for two nights without permission and, according to the University, they spent that time at Mr. Cumming’s flat.

Published: Friday 18 December 1964
Newspaper: Daily Express
The decision to rusticate** 20-year-old Deryck Cumming and 18-year-old Gillian Dawson after they were found together at Mr. Cumming's lodgings has been upheld by the University Council. 

** rusticate
verb:  (ambitransitive, Oxbridge, Durham University) To be suspended or expelled temporarily from the university, either compulsorily or voluntarily.