Dr Greg Thomas introduces Gloria Wilson, Poet Extraordinary: Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Fishing Fleet
In 2023, I visited the nautical writer and artist Gloria Wilson (b. 1939) at her home in the picturesque North Yorkshire fishing village of Saltburn. She was friendly, energetic, unassuming, a wealth of knowledge, with a fascinating life story to tell: from her bohemian childhood and studies under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at Durham University to the covert trips out on fishing boats which rekindled her youthful passion for the sea. Later that year, I wrote about the trip for Scottish Art News.
Since the mid-1960s, Gloria has been a leading authority on fishing craft in Scotland and the north of England. Her 1965 book Scottish Fishing Craft was a trailblazing study of the design and history of Scottish boats. A follow-up, More Scottish Fishing Craft and Their Work, appeared in 1968. In 1971, Gloria became the Scottish correspondent for Fishing News, based in Aberdeen.
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s love of fishing boats – their shape, design, history, and cultural and religious associations – is well-known. And, by the close of the 1960s, Gloria’s writing had became a touchstone for his research, as well as a source of poetic inspiration. Fragments of her texts found their way into poem-postcards such as From The Yard Of Thomas Summers & Co…(1968).
In 1970, Gloria made contact with Finlay after he wrote to Fishing News enclosing a copy of his booklet poem Fishing News News. His accompanying missive describes the lists of fishing boats which he found in the magazine – and in Gloria’s books, of course – as ‘a beautiful litany’, full of biblical, folkloric and bucolic references. This marked the beginning of a sporadic but fruitful collaborative relationship, from the 1971 poem-postcard A Sea-Street Anthology, using a photograph of Gloria’s, to Finlay’s late poem-booklet A Wild Hawthorn Re-Reader, which includes her spirited line drawings.
In this new, lively and authoritative text, Gloria discusses her collaborative endeavours with Finlay, quoting from his letters, while offering marvellous insights into the character and working lives of various vessels we are familiar with from the poet’s oeuvre: Lead Us, Anchor of Hope, etcetera. In places, we are treated to a Melville-esque litany of specifics:
In the language of boat building, Graceful was more full-bodied than Star of Peace, six inches beamier and four inches deeper, with less tuck, flatter floors and harder bilges. Her cruiser stern was more well developed, with greater tumblehome, and her stem was raked forward by a further eight inches.
Elsewhere, Gloria’s writing conveys a lively poetic sense of connection to the sea and the boats, ‘rugged, tarry and water-borne, amid spume and storms, salt-caked and bespattered with iridescent fish scales, … emitting oleaginous diesel vapours’. For Gloria, as for Finlay, we sense that these boats are alive in some way – they have souls, or what she calls geist. Dive in, and get into the spirit of the fleet.
Dr Greg Thomas
Writer and editor
Click on the link below to read Gloria Wilson’s Poet Extraordinary