Poet and writer Reginald John “Jack” Clemo was born in 1916 in Goonamarris, Cornwall, a village whose economy centered on clay. His father was a clay-worker, and his mother was a nonconformist Christian. Clemo grew up in extreme poverty after his father’s death in World War I, in a granite cottage without water, electricity, or drainage. He experienced periods of blindness and deafness beginning at age 5, likely due to syphilis contracted from his father, and he would become almost completely deaf in 1936 and fully blind in 1955. He left school at 12 and underwent an intense religious conversion at fourteen. Despite his lack of formal education and his marginalization by society, he began writing as a young man, using his mother as scribe.
In 1948, Clemo published a novel with Chatto and Windus: Wilding Graft, which won the Atlantic Award. The following year, he published an autobiography, Confession of a Rebel. His first volume of poetry, The Clay Verge, came in 1951. He went on to publish seven more collections of poetry during his lifetime, including The Map of Clay, Cactus on Carmel, The Echoing Tip, Broad Autumn, and A Different Drummer, as well as a volume of selected poems. He also published two further novels, Shadowed Bed and the posthumous The Clay Kiln, a second autobiographical volume, Marriage of a Rebel, and a theological work, The Invading Gospel. Two further poetry collections and a new selected poems were published posthumously.
Clemo’s writing mingled the strands of his stark industrial environs, material poverty, romantic and occasionally erotic imagination, and an unyielding, idiosyncratic Christian faith in works that counted T. F. Powys among their enthusiasts. Clemo believed he had a vocation for marriage, which was finally realized in 1968 when he married laundry worker Ruth Peaty, bringing about a new torrent of poetic output. He was awarded a Civil List pension in 1961, and in 1970 he was made a Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow, with the title prydyth an pry, Poet of the Clay. A documentary by Norman Stone about Clemo, A Different Drummer, aired on BBC in 1980, bringing his work to new readers. In 1981, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Clemo and Peaty moved to the latter’s hometown of Weymouth in 1984.
Clemo died in 1994, but cultural interest in him has returned in recent years, thanks in part to his championing by academic and writer Luke Thompson. Thompson’s biography of Clemo, Clay Phoenix, was published in 2016. Clemo’s papers are held by the University of Exeter.
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More Jack Clemo
Audio: Hear poems by Clemo on Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast
Text: Read two poems by Clemo at the Rescorla Project
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter, reference number EUL MS 68/PERS/3/1/23.