Charles Hobday
Charles Henry Hobday (9 September 1917 – 2 March 2005) was an English poet. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group as well as an editor of the 1940s communist cultural magazine Our Time.
Life
[edit]Hobday was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex in 1917. His father was a soldier, and died six months before he was born. After attending the local grammar school, Hobday received a scholarship to the Queen Mary University of London, where he took a first-class degree in history and English. During his studies he became aware of the immense poverty in the city, and joined the Communist Party in 1938.[1]
Hobday spent the Second World War obtaining a master's degree in Cambridge, and did not serve in the military on medical grounds.[2] At this point, his first poems were published in Our Time, a communist literary journal. The journal was edited by Edgell Rickword, who Hobday would later go on to write a biography about in 1989.
After Our Time folded in 1949, Hobday moved to Bristol to work for Keesing's Contemporary Archive.[2] In 1950, he married Inez Gwendolen Beeching. Over the course of the next decade, he became involved in a campaign to democratise the Communist Party, but left in 1957 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.[1] From the 1960s onward Hobday became more engaged in writing poetry, and less involved in the communist politics of his youth.[1]
In January 1973, Inez Gwendolen Beeching died. Hobday married Helen Strauss, his second and last wife, in 1983.[2] In retirement Hobday wrote many of his most remembered works, including the biography Edgell Rickword (1989); a survey of English poets in Florence, A golden ring (1997); and Elegy for a sergeant (2002), a poem in memory of his uncle who died in the First World War. In 1979, Hobday published the classic essay, "Clouted Soon and Leather Aprons: Shakespear and the Egalitarian Tradition."
While he left the communist party in the 1950s, Hobday remained a socialist and became a member of the Labour Party. However, after the Labour party supported the invasion of Iraq, Hobday left this party too.[1]
Charles Hobday died in 2005, aged 87.
Works
[edit]- The return of Cain (1974)
- Titterstone Clee: A poem (1975)
- A Wreath for Inez (1976)
- "Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian Tradition," Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979): 63-78.
- Communist and Marxist parties of the World (1986)
- Edgell Rickword (1989)
- A golden ring (1997)
- How Goes the Enemy (2000)
- Elegy for a sergeant (2002)
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d Beake, Fred (2005-03-16). "Obituary: Charles Hobday". The Guardian. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
- ^ a b c "Charles Hobday". The Independent. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
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