Poetry or Bust: Tony Harrison on the Trail of 'The Bingley Byron'

An oboe buried on a moor; a lichen-encrusted name carved into a rock; a lost grave; an empty plinth in a Bingley park; a chipped Burmantofts ceramic plaque...

This display tells the cautionary tale of ‘The Bingley Byron’, John Nicholson – and playwright and poet Tony Harrison’s efforts to bring his story to the stage.

John Nicholson was a woolsorter who achieved local fame as a poet in West Yorkshire in the 19th century, but was undone by a fatal combination of arrogance, pliability and drink.

Convinced of his place in literary history, he had his bust made on a visit to London. While there, he got into a drunken argument with a bust of Shakespeare at a theatre and was arrested. His decline continued until, at around midnight on Good Friday 1843, the inebriated poet slipped on stepping-stones in the River Aire as he returned home to Saltaire.

Nicholson’s bust sits at the centre of the display, along with first editions of his poems. Shifting to the 20th century, selections from Tony Harrison’s archive tell a further tall tale. His play about Nicholson, Poetry or Bust, was commissioned by the owner of Salts’ Mill with a seemingly impossible deadline of under three months in which to research and write it. It would be performed to coincide with a David Hockney exhibition at the Mill, under the billing ‘Two Local Artists’.

Photo albums and notebooks reveal how Harrison retraced the poet’s life, including a trip to Eldwick Rocks, where he found Nicholson’s carved autograph and washed it clean with champagne. The premiere of Poetry or Bust was performed by Northern Broadsides on schedule, in the woolcombing shed at Salts Mill – a matter of yards from the site where Nicholson had worked for Sir Titus Salt. Barrie Rutter, who played Nicholson, remembers the play as “theatre at its best: gutsy and tender, raucous and sweet, surfing on the muscular, thrusting rhythms of Tony’s poetic genius”. David Hockney’s designs for the book of the play, drawn and collaged on the hoof in Salts Diner just before the first performance, are also on display.

A tragicomic odyssey through two centuries of Yorkshire literary life, this display is an exploration of working-class experience, the corrupting influence of commerce on creativity, and the fickleness of posterity.