Preferred Citation:	John Masefield Collection (Manuscript Collection MS-02702). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
	Acquisition:	Purchases and gifts, 1960-1994 (R850, R1251, R3596, R3912, R4170, R4228, R4375, R4647, R4848, R4849, R5059, R5159, 5160, Gift 1971, R5890, R5374, R6625, R7323, R7748, R7995, R7996, G7028, R11958, R13296).
	Processed by:	Joan Sibley and Paul Sullivan, 2025. Note: For collection description previously available only in a card catalog, please see the explanatory note for information regarding the arrangement of the manuscripts as well as the abbreviations commonly used in descriptions.

Repository:

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

	John Edward Masefield (1878-1967) was born in the small town of Ledbury, Herefordshire, where his father and grandfather were local lawyers. His mother’s father was rector and benefactor of a village nearby. Jack, as he was called, spent his first years in an old house in the countryside, and in his paternal grandfather’s library. He said that he took from this idyllic time his devotion to reading and love of the natural world. His mother died when he was six, and his father seven years later. At thirteen he was sent by his guardians, concerned by his bookishness, to Liverpool to train for the merchant marine on school-ship H.M.S. Conway. His three years there, his only formal education, steeped him in the lore of ships and seafaring, but also provided ample time to read and write.
	Masefield’s career as a seaman included only two voyages, both miserable, first to South America in 1894, and then to New York in 1895. There, troubled by bad health, he left his ship to explore America while working odd jobs ashore. After a time as a barman in Greenwich Village, he spent two years as a factory worker in Yonkers, New York, where he began buying books (Chaucer, Shelley, and Keats at first) and reading and writing verse. He formed a lasting bond with America, to which he repeatedly returned and where he found important friendships. It was in New York that Masefield, not yet twenty years old, decided to take up poetry as his life’s work.
	In 1897 he returned to England as a passenger on a steamship. Fighting bad health, he eked out a living for three years as a bank clerk to support his reading and writing. In 1900 he became a friend and frequent guest of William Butler Yeats, whose influence is strong in Masefield’s early work, and through whom he made friends with Jack Yeats, John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, and other writers.
	Masefield’s first collection, Salt-Water Ballads, appeared in 1902 and sold well, and the next year he published a second collection, Ballads. Though he had a long and profitable career writing of many subjects, his most quoted and anthologized poems come from his first volume, which also established a persona as a poet of the sea.
	He dedicated Salt-Water Ballads to three women, all, like several women important in his life, considerably older than he was. He was already courting one of them, Constance Maud de la Cherois Crommelin (1866-1960), twelve years his senior, a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and a well-off schoolmistress. They married in July 1903 and soon had one daughter, Isabel Judith Yeats Masefield (1904-1988), and one son, Lewis Crommelin Masefield (1910-1942). From the first his wife and children (and their beloved animals) made creative contributions to Masefield’s life and work. Within a decade of his marriage, he had published two volumes each of poetry, short stories, and popular history, with rising success.
	After the early success of his sea ballads, he turned to longer narrative poems, often voicing hard realities of working life, as in The Everlasting Mercy (1911), about a dissolute ploughman, and Dauber (1913), set on a sailing ship rounding stormy Cape Horn. Both proved popular, and the poet claimed to be primarily a storyteller, though he wrote sonnets and other lyrics throughout his life. In form and technique his poems are often rooted in Victorian conventions, and he gives ample reverence to ancient tradition, religious solemnity, and royal majesty. In language and observation, however, Masefield often places his work among common people and their local perspectives, and his characters reveal skepticism about certain British institutions, including the clergy and the justice system.
	Over a career of sixty-five years, Masefield published more than forty volumes of poetry, two dozen works of prose fiction, a dozen plays in prose and verse, books of history, criticism, and several volumes of memoir. He also steadily produced polemic for such causes as the vote for women, the practice of spoken verse, and public support for writers and reading.
	Masefield’s friendship with Yeats and Gregory prompted an early and lasting engagement with drama and theater. His early plays include rural melodrama (The Tragedy of Nan, 1909), classical history (The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, 1910), British history (Philip the King, 1914), Japanese dynastic tragedy (The Faithful, 1915), and Good Friday (1916), the first of several plays on a Biblical theme. From 1917 the Masefield family produced plays near their house at Boars Hill, Oxford, first in a village hall, and then (disheartened by the villagers’ response) in a small theater built close by. Masefield promoted local theaters in Oxford and elsewhere, and made friends with theater artists including Synge, Harley Granville-Barker, and Dame Sybil Thorndike. A strong interest in ballet surfaced in his poems and prose.
	In the first World War Masefield did volunteer service in field hospitals in France and at Gallipoli, gathering information for British Intelligence. He made two lecture tours to the United States (1916, 1918), raising American support for the British war effort. There he met philanthropist Frances Lamont, who became a lifelong friend and benefactor. Masefield’s field reports to the British Foreign Office resulted in his highly successful work Gallipoli (1916), which framed that notorious military disaster in patriotic glory. He followed this with semi-official histories of the battle of the Somme, and work for the Ministry of Information.
	The Masefields moved in 1919 to Hill Crest, Boars Hill, near Oxford, where they remained until 1933, a period of rural calm in which Masefield wrote two of his most popular and enduring works, the poem Reynard the Fox (1919) and the children’s novel The Midnight Folk (1927), among an array of new plays, poems, essays, studies, and several retrospective collections of his work. With Constance he established the Oxford Recitations competition (1923-1929) to promote verse speaking, and they helped to found Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse (1924).
	In 1930, on the death of Robert Bridges, Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald appointed Masefield as Poet Laureate, and he remained in this post until his death in 1967. The first laureate appointed by a Labour leader, Masefield set out to write and speak for the earthy beauties of Britain’s land and traditions, and he did so stalwartly through the Great Depression, World War II, and the peace and prosperity that followed. In these years he regularly published occasional verse in The Times and elsewhere, celebrating royal events, military valor, the deaths of great Britons, and even the travels of Queen Elizabeth II, "our Sovereign Lady," in her dominions.
	In 1933 the Masefields moved to Pinbury Park, a manor house in the Cotswolds, where they remained for six years. That year, at Masefield’s instigation, a committee headed by the Poet Laureate began awarding a King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. (Also known as The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry when the monarch is female, the medal is also generically called the Royal Poetry Award.) First intended to encourage young poets, the annual election involved gathering votes from leading writers of the day, and the winning poets in Masefield’s time included Auden, Blunden, Sassoon, Betjeman, and Larkin.
	In 1939 the family, concerned by Constance’s declining health, moved close to Oxford again, to Burcote Brook, Clifton Hampden, where they remained for the rest of the poet’s life. Their son Lewis, a conscientious objector in World War II, was killed in 1942 while serving in the medical corps in Africa. After the war Masefield remained active in public causes and continued to write daily. He published memoirs and new verse in his last years, though he struggled with ill health. Constance died at the age of 93 in 1960. Masefield died 12 May 1967 at age 88, and his ashes were placed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

	The collection of the English poet, novelist, and playwright John Masefield, who served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 to 1967, consists of numerous manuscripts and notebooks for his writings, as well as extensive correspondence, and other papers that contain career, family, financial, legal, and personal documents.
	This collection was previously accessible only through a card catalog but has now been re-cataloged as part of a retrospective conversion project. Please see the explanatory note for information regarding the arrangement of the manuscripts as well as the abbreviations commonly used in card catalog descriptions. The material remains as originally organized into four series: I. Works, 1890-1964; II. Letters (Outgoing Correspondence), 1907-1965; III. Recipients (Incoming Correspondence), 1902-1968; and IV. Miscellaneous, 1896-1971, with materials arranged alphabetically by title or author. See the Indexes for Works, Letters, Recipients, and Miscellaneous in this finding aid to further identify titles of works and correspondent names present in this collection. Additional materials not previously cataloged in the card catalog include two later acquisitions of single letters written by John Masefield in 1944 to Cyril Lakin and in 1913 to an unidentified recipient (folders 81.1 and 81.2).
	Series I., Works, 1890-1964 (boxes 1-53) contains writings by Masefield that constitute nearly two-thirds of this collection. Masefield’s literary career spanned his early association with mentors W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge, his work as Poet Laureate (1930-1967) and as founder of the Royal Poetry Award (1933), which brought him into contact with the work of many British poets of the later twentieth century such as Ted Hughes.
	The works by Masefield encompass several genres of writings, mainly poems (also sonnets, ballads, and verse), novels, and plays (in both prose and verse), but also non-fiction, memoirs, and children’s literature for which he was popular (The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights), along with some diaries, introductions, lectures, prefaces, speeches, and translations. The writings themselves exist as notebooks containing handwritten drafts; handwritten and typed manuscripts (often bearing small sketches or drawings, frequently of ships); galley proofs; and page proofs.
	Among the earliest works are The Annals of the Guinea Pig Association (1890-1894), a record kept by Masefield and his younger siblings; juvenilia (1893-1895); two early stories (1901); and an early draft of the poem "The Dead Knight," written in a letter to his future wife Constance and published later that year in Salt-Water Ballads (1902). Major works in manuscript include The Everlasting Mercy (1911), Dauber (1913), Gallipoli (1916), The Midnight Folk (1927), and The Box of Delights (1935). The latest career works represented are poems published in The Bluebells and Other Verse (1961) and Old Raigar and Other Verse (1964).
	While Masefield’s early experience with the sea was both a first and a life-long inspiration for his work, he also wrote on a wide range of other subjects and personal enthusiasms: Authors (Chaucer, William Morris. Shakespeare, and others); Classical themes; Folklore; Great Britain: its history, literature, pastimes (e.g., cricket, fox hunts, horse races), people, and places; Nature; Performing arts, especially the theater (both professional and amateur) and ballet; Religious themes; Spoken verse; Travel; the United States; World War I and World War II; and Women’s rights, such as suffrage.
	See the Index of Works in this finding aid to identify individual titles of works present in this collection. Also present are drafts of Masefield’s writings as Poet Laureate, including poems and some speeches, as well as reports and notes about the Royal Poetry Award.
	Correspondence is contained in Series II. Letters (Outgoing Correspondence), 1890-1964 (boxes 54-56) and Series III. Recipients (Incoming Correspondence), 1902-1968 (boxes 57-72). Both the outgoing Masefield letters and the larger group of incoming correspondence include exchanges, sometimes intensely personal, that are dominated by family, friends, colleagues (including many fellow authors), and publishers. Overlapping these are Masefield’s work as Poet Laureate and for the Royal Poetry Award.
	Family letters exchanged between John Masefield and his wife Constance and their children Judith and Lewis reveal their importance in his life and work. Over 500 letters from Constance ("Con") to John ("Jan") are the most extensive, dating from 1902 to about 1940, covering the period of the Masefields’ engagement and marriage, the birth of their two children, and their work together on The Arts and Industrial Exhibition in Wolverhampton (1902) and the Oxford Recitations competition (1923-1929). During this time, Constance worked with longtime friend and colleague Isabel Fry as a schoolmistress and teacher. Masefield frequently sent postcards to Judith and Lewis that pictured the various places he visited during his travels.
	Authors and colleagues who are well-represented as Masefield correspondents include Sir Maurice Bowra, Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, Cecil Day Lewis, Walter de la Mare, Charles Morgan, Gilbert Murray, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Osbert Sitwell, and Laurence Whistler. Their correspondence often (though not exclusively) concerns their participation in the Royal Poetry Award Committee overseen by Masefield. Letters regarding the Award sometimes express opinions about award nominees and also enclose some “voting papers” (ballots) cast and submitted to Masefield. Although the Award was established in 1933, most of the Award correspondence dates from 1950 to 1966, years when John Betjeman, Edmund Blunden, Frances Cornford, Christopher Fry, Ralph Hodgson, Philip Larkin, Ruth Pitter, William Plomer, Siegfried Sassoon, R. S. Thomas, Arthur Waley, and Andrew Young were the awardees.
	Among other notable Masefield correspondents in the collection are Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Bridges, Rupert Brooke, Bryher (Winifred Bryher), Sir Winston Churchill, T. S. Eliot, John Galsworthy, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Florence Lamont, Thomas Lamont, Denise Levertov, Somerset Maugham, Ruth Pitter, Michael Powell, J. B. Priestley, Elizabeth Robins, George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, Muriel Spark, Marie Stopes, Michael Thwaites, J. R. R. Tolkien, Arthur Waley, Sir Hugh Walpole, Jack Butler Yeats, and William Butler Yeats.
	Masefield’s correspondence also includes both personal and professional exchanges with important theater figures and organizations, among them Sir John Gielgud, Harley Granville-Barker, Incorporated Stage Society, League of British Dramatists, Lillah McCarthy, The Mask Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, J. M. Synge, and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Masefield also had a great interest in ballet, evidenced by correspondence with Beryl Grey, Vitale Fokine, Nadine Nicolaeva-Legat, Margaret Severn, and Merlyn Severn.
	Correspondence also documents Masefield’s work as Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967 under four British monarchs: George V (1930-1936), Edward VIII (1936), George VI (1936-1952), and Elizabeth II (1952-1967). Correspondence from the monarch to Masefield was typically written on the King’s or Queen’s behalf by the appointed Private Secretary to the Sovereign or their staff. There is additional correspondence with Royal Household offices, mainly the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and the Privy Purse Office.
	While many publishers are represented in the correspondence, Masefield’s British publisher William Heinemann, Ltd. (1916-1966) and his American publisher Macmillan Company (1916-1963) are the most extensive. Related royalty statements can be found in Series IV., Miscellaneous. Substantial correspondence is also present for the Society of Authors, of which Masefield was President starting in 1937.
	See the Index of Letters and the Index of Recipients in this finding aid to identify individual correspondents represented in this collection.
	Note: Many of Masefield’s letters have been published, among them are those to his wife Constance from the front during World War I, 1915-1917 and to Brangwen (ballerina Barbara Vernon), Margaret Bridges (daughter of poet Robert Bridges), Frances Lamont (philanthropist and benefactor), and Reyna (violinist Audrey Napier Smith).
	Series IV. Miscellaneous, 1896-1971 (boxes 72-82) comprises third-party works and correspondence (i.e., not written by or to Masefield), plus some Masefield personal and career-related papers. Most materials are filed alphabetically by creator.
	Dominant among the John Masefield items in this series are contracts for many of his books, royalty statements from various publishers, and several licenses for plays from the Lord Chamberlain. Additional papers for the Royal Poetry Award include lists of books, committee members, and nominees, as well as voting papers (especially for 1951), and Masefield’s diary notes and vote tabulations. Other papers for Masefield include bank records, household and other bills and receipts, insurance policies, and real estate documents. There are also three honorary degrees, two passports, and a will, as well as items received from schoolchildren (at Blackheath High School, London, and Colac State School, Australia), plus a report on pupil and teacher reactions to a telecast of The Box of Delights.
	Constance Masefield is represented in this series by banking and investment documents, a Crommelin family history notebook, wedding mementoes, a passport and a will. There are also letters to and from her children, Judith and Lewis, and from others, including Laurence Binyon, Gordon Bottomley, Harley Granville-Barker, Corliss Lamont, Thomas Lamont, Charlotte Payne-Townsend, and Michael Sadler among several others.
	Judith Masefield is represented by drawings and illustrations, stories and poems, and letters to and from her mother Constance, among others. Lewis Masefield’s second novel The Passion Left Behind (posthumously published in 1947) is present in several drafts and his correspondence includes letters to and from his mother Constance, plus a scrapbook of postcards. Both Judith and Lewis are represented, along with other contributors, in The Boars Hill Supplement, vol. II, a scrapbook of literary and art effort.
	Other items of interest include a joint letter to the press concerning German POWs in 1949 by Violet Bonham Carter and others; a playscript for When Good King Arthur by Alfred Jones, with director’s notes; and acting notes by actress Irene Rooke written on a printed copy of The Tragedy of Nan.
	See the Index of Miscellaneous in this finding aid for detailed descriptions from the card catalog in this segment of the collection to identify creators of works and correspondence.

	In addition to references to other John Masefield holdings in numerous other Harry Ransom Center collections, see also:
	• Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library: John Masefield papers, 1913-1973 (11 boxes)
	• New York Public Library. Berg Collection: John Masefield collection of papers, 1894-1966 (952 items)
	• Oxford University. Bodleian Library: Archive of John Masefield, 1901-1968 (135 boxes)
	• Yale University. Beinecke Library: John Masefield collection, 1903-1963 (3 boxes)
	See Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) for links to additional John Masefield manuscripts in American and British repositories. Search also the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters for John Masefield holdings in British and Irish repositories.
	See also The Online Books Page for links to the complete texts of many John Masefield books.
	Other sources of information include the John Masefield Society and the Masefield Matters blog of the Ledbury Town Council in Ledbury, England.

	The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center:
	• Art: The John Masefield Art Collection consists of 47 drawings and prints by John, Constance, and Judith Masefield, and by unidentified artists. The works include a John Masefield sketchbook from World War I (August to September 1915) and his sketchbook of seaside landscapes, also drawings of ships, and other subjects. The Charles Dickens Art Collection contains two illustrations for Masefield’s The Midnight Folk. The George Schreiber Art Collection contains two drawings of John Masefield by Schreiber.
	• Books: The Ransom Center Book Collection includes books formerly owned by John Masefield. These can be located by searching The University of Texas Library Catalog and selecting the Provenance field and using the search term “Masefield, John, 1878-1967.”
	• Objects: Masefield personal effects at the Ransom Center include: Bruno, daughter Judith’s teddy bear; Brushes, four items: two are hairbrushes with Masefield’s name written on them, one may be a clothing brush; Desk set with inkwell, pen holder; Matchbox, decorated, includes word 'coffee' on it; Medallion awarded for The Three Counties Poetry Festival; and Pocketbook (or wallet) with handwritten note indicating that Masefield used it to carry poems or pages of plays while working on them.
	• Photographs: John Masefield Literary File Photography Collection consists of 318 photographs, including images of Masefield, members of his family, and various other people.
	• Vertical File: Four boxes of printed ephemera removed from manuscripts and books during the cataloging process. Materials are largely newspaper clippings, articles and criticism on Masefield works, biographical information, and information on various subjects, such as authors, English royalty, hunting, Oxford Recitations, ships, superstition and phenomena, Thomas Hardy’s funeral, and World War I. Other formats of materials include advertisements, dust jackets, invitations, playbills, postcards, programs, posters, and tickets.

	People
		Cecil, David, 1902-1986
		Coghill, Nevill, 1899-1900
		De la Mare, Walter, 1873-1956
		Granville-Barker, Harley, 1877-1946
		Grey, Beryl, 1927-2022
		Lamont, Florence Corliss, 1872-1952
		Lamont, Thomas W. (Thomas William), 1870-1948
		Masefield, Constance, -1960
		Morgan, Charles, 1894-1958
		Murray, Gilbert, 1866-1957
		Sackville-West, V. (Victoria), 1892-1962
		Sitwell, Osbert, 1892-1969
		Whistler, Laurence, 1912-2000
		Yeats, Jack B. (Jack Butler), 1871-1957
	Organizations
		Macmillan Company
		Society of Authors (Great Britain)
		William Heinemann, Ltd.
	Subjects
		Authors
		English literature -- 20th century
		Great Britain -- History
		Monarchy -- Great Britain
		Poets, English
		Poets laureate
		Seafaring life
		Theater -- England
		World War, 1914–1918
	Places
		England
		Great Britain
	Document Types
		Correspondence
		Diaries
		Galley proofs
		Manuscripts
		Notebooks