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Joan Ure: MSLC 2024 – ‘This moment of humanity, found amongst the unvarying typescript, was a real treasure’

By sammaddra on June 24, 2024 • ( 0 )

A guest blog post by Thomas Kane, from the Memorialising Scottish Literature & Culture placement, working on the Papers of Joan Ure (ASC 011 A: Writings) in Archives and Special Collections

The Archives and Special Collections department, situated at the very top of Glasgow University’s library tower, is an incredible place. Despite having few interactions with ASC until in my third year of studies, the twelfth floor always had a mystical feel about it – perhaps due to the fact that unlike other floors, it was not accessible except via prior appointment. It was not until an induction session on to the placement for the Memorialising Scottish Literature and Culture course that the extent of the library’s collection became clear as an impressive resource.

The brief for the placement was to catalogue items related to the late Joan Ure, a poet and playwright born in England but who lived her life in Scotland. Ure’s daughter had donated to ASC the personal papers and writings of her mother. Our role was to take some of these items, and catalogue them so that in future these papers could become accessible as part of the Scottish Theatre Archive, housed within ASC. Each student, myself included, were designated a folder containing Ure’s papers, already alphabetised. Our brief was to describe the contents of the folders. In my designated folder, there were roughly 40 items, the majority were poems written by Ure, some scripts for theatre and radio plays, and the odd outlier.

The first of these outliers was a thirty-eight page document entitled ‘Dialogue: A Thirty-Minute Play by Alastair Gray.’ This immediately struck my interest. I was a fan of Gray’s work prior and in fact, Lanark, Gray’s first published novel, was where I had first encountered the name Joan Ure. In Lanark’s famously out-of-sequence chapter ‘Epilogue’, Gray lists for pages all of the so-called plagiarisms that he has made throughout the book. Joan Ure is listed amongst the likes of T S Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid as one of the authors he had plagiarised. Finding his work amongst Ure’s personal papers was a moment of personal satisfaction; Gray and Ure appeared to be acquainted, even if the script itself did not provide any further insight to the relationship they may have had.

Another, entitled ‘Have You Got a Saint In Your Collection’ was again, a moment away from poetry. Within this folder contained two short stories, both with the same title above. The first, typewritten was just six pages long and began: “My friend said on his last visit[…]”. The second, in marginally better condition, was extended a further 3 pages. It appeared to be a redraft of the first, with the language elaborate and poetic in a way that the first did not. It began: “On his most recent visit to our usually ordinary home[…]” Unfortunately, neither of these typescripts were dated, but the hypothesis that this was a showcase of Ure’s writing process was fascinating.

One trouble I found while documenting Ure’s work was her proclivity to write on a typewriter. There were very few marking on pages in her own hand, electing instead to neatly typewrite most of her works. Granted, this would have been potentially faster, and certainly neater, however it removed the personal touch that might be found when consulting the works of other writers. Although the papers were kept in remarkably good condition for their age (most would be approximately seventy years old), I would have expected to see more handwritten notes and creases and folds as the papers were left on desks and written and re-written. This, and the fact that the vast majority of these items were hole-punched, leads me to believe that Ure was a fastidious worker, one who made an effort to keep her work in good condition – neat and organised. That being said, within the folder ‘Easter Yearly,’ a handwritten letter proceeded the poem, signed in her own hand as Betty Clark – her real name. This moment of humanity, found amongst the unvarying typescript, was a real treasure.

*ASC 011 A/57: Press cutting from Glasgow Herald*

Without doubt, my favourite item in my folder was a newspaper cutting – the only newspaper cutting I had come across – from Saturday, January 25th 1958; fairly early on in Ure’s writing career. It contained, along with a picture of Robert Burns (after all, it was 25th January) a short story entitled ‘Her Loneliness’ written by Elizabeth Clark, again Ure’s real name. It was not so much the story that grabbed my attention as it was the cutting itself. Neatly preserved, folded carefully and clearly cherished, it struck me as a representation of an artist being published. The newspaper was the Glasgow Herald, now The Herald, a national newspaper, meaning that Clark’s words would be read up and down Scotland. It was a really moving moment to find this gem within Ure’s collection and I could only sit and postulate on the meaning of this particular cut out – analogous to keeping a cut-out of a child’s primary school photo or an obituary of a loved one. That it was there and kept in such excellent condition, I really felt that this was a genuinely proud moment in Ure’s life.

Through this collection, and the work undertaken to catalogue it, it is hoped that these papers will be available for study and reference in the future. Joan Ure is a severely under-appreciated voice in the history of twentieth-century Scottish Literature. As a poet and playwright, her mastery of language and eloquence in dramaturgy make her a figure that truly deserves appreciation. I would hope that as these papers are made available that Ure’s reputation within the Scottish Literary community is grown and understood. A writer fully engaged in the literary circles of the twentieth-century, she deserves real appreciation in the twenty-first.