Ted Hughes's oldest and closest fishing friend was the British-born Irish artist Barrie Cooke
and Ted and Barrie were introduced by a mutual acquaintance in 1958. They fished together
from 1962 until Ted's death in 1998. Barrie was not just a fine completely devoted artist
and fisherman but also the best friend of Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate and to discover
this pretty much unrecognised, deep triangular friendship and the creative
elements of that friendship the collaborations the two great poets and Barrie were engaged in
was an extraordinary discovery.
In the Barrie Cooke archive there are some 85 poems typescript
and manuscript some unpublished by Seamus Heaney and the most wonderfully expressive
letters accompanying those poems. There are about 25 great long letters from Ted Hughes mostly about
their shared passion for fishing but with poems sent in typescript from 1962 through the 1980s.
And these are great poems but there are also letters and poems and manuscripts from a range
of other writers, very significant writers.
So the range of that work,
the circle that Barrie assembled around him and it's a kind of rough wild equivalent of the
Bloomsbury Group but completely unrecognised, all of that is palpable in the letters, the manuscripts
but also the guest book that Barrie and his third wife Jean Valentine kept, the sketchbooks that
he prepared to inform the collaborations that he worked on with Ted and Seamus.
Both Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney clearly responded to this exemplary life of dedication
to the art, the land, the water that Barrie embodied. Barrie's commitment to the world of nature, in all
of its sensuousness and even sensuality, gave Ted and Seamus both permission to write sensually and
sensuously but in response to Ireland's and the British Isles' natural, cultural, political history.
Fishing is an enormously popular pastime in the UK and globally. Several million people say they fish.
Several million people say they write and read poetry. They are rarely the same several million
people but for Ted, it was his way of exploring both the natural world and his place in it.
And the adventures that they had fishing for different species revealed different parts of his own self.
These stories of great friendships, great poets, a really fine painter provide, will
provide the general public with the sense of how creativity works, how friendship becomes great art.
And I think it's really important that we will be able to display these in a new
public gallery which will open on Trumpington Street here in Cambridge in 2022. We also hope
very seriously that this material which emerges from cross-border friendships, not
just between the borders between painting and poetry but between Great Britain and Ireland -
we want to make sure that the British and Irish public have
access to these so we very much hope that there will be touring exhibitions perhaps.
For British and Irish scholars and the wider public this extraordinary treasure - is vital.