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MacNeice memories
• DAN Carrier’s articles on the poet Louis MacNeice (Review, September 21 and 28) jogged my memory.
I was a friend of the late Welsh poet John Tripp (The Province of Belief, The Inheritance File).
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).
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 Dannie 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, N7
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