on Montagu Slater

Pompapom, Pimpapombimban

The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater is an intriguing read. Born in 1902, and having grown up in industrial Cumbria, Slater won a rare scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Despite that brush with the elite (or perhaps because of it) Slater went on to be a committed communist all his adult life, and his socialist leanings chimed with other thirties poets of the time, such as Stephen Spender and the young W.H. Auden.

A rigorous introduction by Ben Harker (Professor in Cultural Politics at the University of Manchester) defines Slater as more than simply accomplished; rather, he was prolific. And yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, the relatively obscure Slater seems to have been ambivalent to recognition. Frequently uncredited on collaborative projects, this was a person totally focused on exposing the capitalist economic exploitation of the working class through his own political writing, and that of others.

‘In Encitement to Disaffection: A Fragment’, Slater sites labour as a battle, one in which there are no shiny medals, only muddy tin hats. This poem also includes a reference to Humphry Davy, inventor of the Davy lamp which saved countless miners’ lives by detecting explosive gasses such as firedamp:

Khaki’s a nice quiet colour
Tin hats don’t shine
Sombre as a Humphry Davy
In a fire-damp mine.

Nationalism is then ridiculed in the final line of the first stanza, which could also be the sound of an explosion: ‘Pompapom pompapom pimpapombimban’.

As with many other writers of his ...