[John Whitworth]

When I worked in London the house next door belonged to the Theosophists. No-one was ever seen going either out or in. On the other side (though this is quite irrelevant) there was a hotel full of Irish girls seeking abortions.

[Jerome Betts]

John, the 'fruit' usage was a bit earlier in the 60s than your years and may have rapidly died. I suspect it may have been an import from some public school, perhaps Shrewsbury, which Richard Ingrams attended. He and Paul Foot edited Parson's Pleasure. Anyway, the fruit slang was sufficiently well known to make the joke headline work.

[Holly Martins]

W.H.Davies has been mentioned here but I can never think of him as a true Georgian, not middle-class enough and his style not literary enough, too rough and unsophisticated. Marrying a 20 year-old prostitute when he was 50 must have escaped the notice of the civil servant who allowed his name to be submitted to the PM as a possible Poet Laureate.

SHEEP

When I was once in Baltimore
A man came up to me and cried,
"Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
And we will sail on Tuesday's tide.

If you will sail with me, young man,
I'll pay you fifty shillings down;
These eighteen hundred sheep I take
From Baltimore to Glasgow town."

He paid me fifty shillings down,
I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
We soon had cleared the harbour's mouth,
We soon were in the salt sea deep.

The first night we were out at sea
Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear -
They smelt no pastures in the wind.

They sniffed poor things for their green fields,
They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

John,

I'm not at all suprised about the Irish girls in the hotel. They are a libinous race, especially on the distaff side.

[John Whitworth]

Didn't W.H. Davies have one eg. Or was it W.E. Henley that had one leg. Or did they both have one leg? Were they everphotographed together. Rimbaud, of course, had only one leg. The other was bitten off by a crocodile. OK. Can we get a cricket team of one-legged poets?

[Richard Epstein]

Each had one leg amputated below the knee. After your one-legged poets' cricket match everyone could eat at Long John Silver's*, where one of them could recite

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-one-legged-man-2/

RHE
*Stevenson is said to have based LJS on Henley.

[John Whitworth]

A cricket match was played at Greenwich in 1796 between eleven one-armed men and eleven one-legged men. It was stopped by a riot. But in the return match the one-legged prevailed. The stake was 1,000 guineas. That would be an awful lot in our money. Maybe a million.

It's the one-legged soccer that I enjoy watching.