Poet, author and WEA lecturer, he was born on 8 January 1914 in Millom, Cumberland, the son of a draper. Apart from an interval in his 'teens spent in a Hampshire sanatorium being treated for TB, he lived there throughout his life. His grandparents had been Bible Christians, but joined the Wesleyans when they moved to Millom. He was brought up by a Methodist step-mother and, though he was confirmed in the Church of England, he always acknowledged the influence of the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel. After a period of religious doubt, in 1940 he found his way back into the Christian faith under the influence of an Anglican, Brother George Every.
His denominational ambivalence is reflected in his novels. The Fire of the Lord (1944) has an Anglican setting; in The Green Shore (1947) the character Anthony Pengwilly is a Methodist convert and most of the other characters are Bible Christians. Much of his work as poet and dramatist has biblical and religious themes, including his verse play on the life of Elijah, The Old Man of the Mountains (1946). His Times obituary speaks of his poetry as being 'written under the influence, but not in the shadow of Wordsworth' and singles out 'its humour and its reticent passion'. His first book of poems, Five Rivers (1944) won him the Heinemann Prize for Poetry and in 1967 he shared the Cholmondeley Prize with Samuel Heaney and Brian Jones. He wrote a life of William Cowper (1951) and edited several anthologies. His major work of literary criticism was Man and Literature (1943). His writing won him a number of honours, including two honorary degrees and an OBE. His hymn, 'Come, workers for the Lord' (HP 380) was written for a service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in connection with an exhibition of craftwork by Approved School pupils; it is not in Singing the Faith. His autobiography, Wednesday Early Closing (1975) vividly describes the local influences of his formative years. He died at Whitehaven on 30 May 1987.
'Although I have now found my home in the Anglican Church, I feel that as a poet I draw more strength from my experiences of Methodism.'
(Quoted in Methodist Recorder, 4 April 1957)
'The Methodists, in my youth, contrary to what was often said of them, rarely preached, or even thought, about hell-fire. Theirs was not a religion of fear, but one of an extraordinarily reassuring warmth and comfort. It was, in fact, a social religion. I suspect that, for many members of the congregation, as for my mother and certainly for me, the dogma, the theology, the sectarian tenets hardly mattered at all. In my argumentative, near atheist early twenties, I once challenged my mother to say what she meant by "Christianity". '"We believe that God is Love," she said, confident that she had summed up all she had been taught. 'What people find so hard to understand today is that most Methodists went to chapel because they enjoyed it. The chapel was not only their Place of Worship - it was their place of entertainment, their ancestral home, their music hall, assembly room, meeting house, club and gossip-shop. It came to me as a complete surprise, in my teenage years, to find that the Methodists were considered to be kill-joys, who got little pleasure out of life. For, at least up to the age of thirteen, the chapel seemed to me to be one of the happiest places in the town … 'When I say "chapel", I mean all the activities which took place in the chapel itself, in the two schools, in the Men's Institute and in the charmingly named Church Parlour, where the Wesley Guild held its weekly meetings. But of course it was in the chapel building that the bonding process began, the welding together of the congregation into a group, a tribe, a family, a religious Trade Union or Frieldly Society, all in one.' Norman Nicholson, Wednesday Early Closing (1975), pp.93-4