Ty'd Up to Poetry

When George Bernard Shaw rhymed an English village

Jul 21, 2025

I’m going to take a month’s holiday from Some Flowers Soon until mid-August. Paid subscriptions will be paused, which means everyone will get an extra month. Thanks to all subscribers, new and old, for reading this year — I’m looking forward to beginning what will be the fifth year of writing about poetry here in the autumn. Today’s post is for paid subscribers, but from last summer I’ve made this one about wasps free to read…

That Palpitating Moment

Jeremy Noel-Tod

August 4, 2024

Read full story

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,
With which like ships they steer their courses

Samuel Butler, Hudibras

I sometimes dream I’m in a second-hand bookshop where I find a unique item, previously unknown — my favourite being a pop-up edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. But sometimes I really am in a second-hand bookshop, awake, and find a book that seems like something I could have dreamed. My most recent find was a catalogue for surgical equipment full of snappily captioned cat pictures:

Today’s post, though, is about this pamphlet:

Bernard Shaw’s Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence (1950) was the last published work of the Irish playwright and Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw, who died later that year. It is a short tour in verse of the Hertfordshire village where Shaw lived for over 40 years, illustrated by his own photographs. He completed it at the age of 94, out of affection for the place, but also in the knowledge that he himself had become the village’s biggest draw for out-of-town visitors.

Shaw is one of those writers who — like Robert Browning in the nineteenth century — once enjoyed a literary celebrity that we can now only measure by visiting the long library shelves of books once written about them by their admirers. Just as there was a Browning Society dedicated to the appreciation of the poet’s works, so there was a Shaw Society, founded in London in 1941. And although Shaw wrote to the founders of the society “go ahead, but don’t bother me about it”, he wasn’t shy of letting fans know where he lived in Ayot Saint Lawrence. The rhyming guide begins with his own house and its personalised iron gate:

What I like about the guide is how, after this grand opening, it then settles into what are surely the most humdrum combinations of words and pictures ever committed by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw has enough writerly pride to remind us that he knows what he’s doing, however. Leaving Shaw’s Corner, he writes:

Here then we start with gait elastic
In step to doggerel Hudibrastic.
First northward up the lane we travel
Not much to note but green and gravel

Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, a satirical mock-heroic poem about a Puritan knight, was hugely popular with readers between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. It established the ingeniously-rhymed, bathetic, octosyllabic couplet as the standard form for comic verse in English (Byron was a fan). Of a bad poet who will versify anything, Butler writes:

He would an elegy compose
On maggots squeez’d out of his nose;
In lyrick numbers write an ode on
His mistress, eating a black-pudden:
And when imprison’d air escap’d her,
It puft him with poetic rapture.
[…]
A carman’s horse could not pass by,
But stood ty’d up to poetry.

Shaw takes up Butler’s form in the same omnivorous spirit, and uses it to annotate modern rural life, from the village squash court to mock-Tudor decoration:

Philip Larkin distilled suburban poetry from such ingredients (“dark raftered pubs / Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis clubs” (“Essential Beauty”)) but Shaw leaves them at flat facts. There are more interesting pages, though, such as this one, which seems to suggest that Shaw himself found the lopped-off hands of the couple sculpted on a tomb in the disused local church — a medieval building deliberately ruined by the lord of the manor in the eighteenth century to create a Gothic folly:

Elsewhere, Shaw’s socialism tinges the commentary. Here, he alludes to the post-war Britain which saw the founding of the welfare state at a time when many of the landed gentry had become unable to maintain their large houses:

By the middle of the pamphlet, we are back in the garden at Shaw Corner, where the Hudibrastic rhyming reaches a peak inspired by a picture of a flowering tree stump:

My favourite single poem-picture in the pamphlet is the one about Shaw’s own writing shed, which he nicknamed “London”, so visitors could truthfully be told that was where had gone:

The photo is the blurriest shot included here. But the phrase “shattering sunlight” catches the effect of the over-exposure nicely, its shadow and shimmer suggesting the energy with which Shaw wrote “helter skelter” (his Collected Works ran to thirty volumes), using a revolving mechanism to keep the sunlight on his desk across the day.

Leaving Shaw’s Corner by another route, there is more middle England modernity to be glimpsed on the distance: “Ayot’s first built bungalow”.

And here we reach the end, with a gate leading out of the village to the London road:

Now there is nothing more for me to tell.
Thanks for your shilling friend; and fare thee well.

Shaw being a talkative sort, however, this isn’t actually the end. Over the page there’s a portrait of his “neighbour of the greatest fame”: Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Captain Scott’s fateful last attempt to reach the South Pole, an experience he described in his memoir The Worst Journey in the World (1922).

Bernard Shaw’s Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence is, admittedly, nothing to write home about as poetry. But I bought it immediately on finding it because I couldn’t quite believe it was real — and I’ve kept it because it is a snapshot (or several) of an English world between two eras, as joined by a 94-year-old man who was familiar with both Samuel Butler and bungalows, polar explorers and squash players.

This historical doubleness is also buried in its composition. The first version was written in 1916, after the actress Ellen Terry visited Ayot Saint Lawrence, but failed to visit Shaw. Learning that she had stopped at the local post office to buy some postcards, Shaw wrote to her with “a real Ayot album to put them in”, featuring his own pictures and rhymes. In 1949, this unique copy was returned to Shaw, prompting him to expand it and make it public.

Harold White, the local printer he worked with at The Leagrave Press, decided quietly to leave some pages out, “feeling that they might damage his reputation”. And Shaw himself came round to the view that mentioning Terry in the revised version was a distraction from his true love: Ayot Saint Lawrence. To quote Samuel Butler again;

She that with poetry is won,
Is but a desk to write upon;
And what men say of her, they mean
No more than on the thing they lean.

When younger, Shaw and Terry had corresponded intensely and sometimes flirtatiously about theatre (the letters were published in 1931, three years after Terry died), but met in person very rarely. It seems possible the couplets White left out included the following toe-curlers:

This scene, which would a stone unharden,
Is but the view from Bernard’s garden.
[…]
You see the house that Bernard weeps in
Because his Ellen never peeps in.

My source for the lines above is a book which in some ways is even more extraordinary than the Rhyming Picture Guide itself. I found it on a library shelf of now-dusty books devoted to GBS, as he was popularly known. Shaw the Villager and Human Being: A Biographical Symposium (1962), by Allan Chappelow, is a thick compilation of reminiscences by people who knew Shaw in Ayot Saint Lawrence. It features an Agatha-Christie-like cast of locals, including “Mrs. Jisbella Lyth, the Legendary Village Postmistress of Ayot Saint Lawrence”, who recalls:

Many’s the time he’s helped me with my crossword puzzles. I shall always remember one occasion when the clue word was “fret”. It had to do with Shakespeare — something about “strut and fret across the stage.” I remember Mr. Shaw was exceptionally interested and quite excited and gave me a whole lecture on it!

Mrs. Lyth also recalls the time a customer bought a postcard she had for sale of Shaw standing in front of Shaw’s Corner, “tore it up into little pieces, forming a pile on my front door mat, and finally walked away without a word”.

Postcard of Shaw, “The Chucker Out”, age 94

A gentler critic of Shaw to feature in the volume is Francis T. Wayne, “formerly a resident and Churchwarden of Ayot”. Wayne, we are told, “did not see eye to eye with Shaw on certain matters, including the local history and topography”. His contribution is titled “A Rhyming Corrigenda to Shaw’s Rhyming Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence”, and its Hudibrastic pedantry is quite spectacular. Shaw, for example, says the village church is five centuries old, but Wayne sets him straight:

At this mis-statement, into the lists thus enter I —
Part of the Church is said to be twelfth century.

And he points out that the photo of “Ayot’s first built bungalow” is also in error, as it clearly shows a building with more than one storey:

What ancient British hutment ever bore
Like this, a window on the upper floor.

(Wayne, though, himself seems confused here about “ancient British hutment”: the etymology of “bungalow” comes from the Hindi banglā, and dates from the late seventeenth-century English of both Hudibras and the East Indian Company.)

I don’t really know what to add to all this except to marvel that, 75 years ago, such a world existed. You will still find local historians in most English villages, but not many who could jot down their knowledge in witty mock-heroic couplets — or what Samuel Butler called “small poets’ splay-foot rhymes”.