Portsmouth poet, Denise Bennett has written two poems centred on the department store, Handleys of Southsea, which once occupied the site on the corner of Osborne Road and Palmerston Road that became the location of Debenhams until its closure in 2021. Handleys was established in 1869 and the original building survived until the Second World War. A new Handleys was built after WWII, but Handleys survived only until the 1970s when it was bought out by Debenhams.

Both poems were published in the collection Parachute Silk published by Oversteps Books in 2015, and both are included here with the kind permission of the poet. ‘Handleys’, which was commended in the Havant Literary Festival 2014, evokes the inter-war period through the experiences of a female servant. Pithy, sparse, and moving, ‘Roll Call 1914-1918’ centres around a plaque recording the store workers who lost their lives in service during World War I.

Handleys

She used to come here before the war
when there were linen tablecloths,
silver service, when white-capped waitresses
in black, flew around the floor.

Each Friday she escorted her mistress
three o’clock, on the dot,
to sip a cup of Earl Grey whilst listening
to the Hungarian orchestra play.

Sometimes she imagined herself
letting down her long red hair
stamping in a scarlet-swirl skirt
to make the tea cups rattle;

mostly though, she sat demure,
with Mrs. Raphael on a table that faced the sea,
observed the ritual of pastry forks,
the tremble of the gypsy fiddle,

watched as women with tiny hats
clamped to Marcel waves, dispensed
with their lace gloves, ordered tea-cakes
or scones in the flap of a napkin

while she sat in her neat, navy suit,
a grass widow, hugging a bundle
of blue-ribboned letters to her heart,
clocking up the days to his home-coming.

Each week she stashed her dreams
in the bank, sometimes there was extra pay
when Madam fancied Mantovani on a Wednesday. Every note building her bungalow.

Roll Call 1914–18
Debenhams Lobby- Once Handleys Of Southsea

Barker, Cartwright, Carpenter,
Denning, Emington, these are
the men who didn’t come back;

who worked in Cabinets, Despatch,
Soft Furnishing, Gents Outfitting
at Handleys of Southsea.

Goodwin, Jerome, Lipscombe…
How many times have I walked
past this space, not noticed the names.

Marshall, Pace, Parkin,
Penfold who worked in the factory;
Private Tollerfield and Tomlinson

and Gunner Whaley – all dead;
these men who made or sold
suits, shirts, curtains, furniture

who swapped tools, rulers, tapes
paper and string, for guns, mud and blood;
who gave all, for a plaque on the wall.

Denise Bennett was born in Festing Road Southsea and has lived locally all her life. She had her first poem accepted by her school magazine, The Hot Potato, when she attended John Pounds School, Portsea. As many people know, John Pounds was a pioneer of education for ragged children in Portsmouth. Denise has an MA in creative writing and is a widely published, prize winning poet. She was awarded the inaugural Hamish Canham Prize by the Poetry Society in 2004. Denise has three excellent collections: Planting the Snow Queen (2011) and Parachute Silk (2015) and Water Chits (2017). She has also written a sequence of poems about the loss of HMS Royal George which foundered off Spithead in 1782, with the loss of over 900 lives. In 2010 she co-edited the wonderful anthology, This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry with Maggie Sawkins and Dale Gunthorp.

Local history often inspires Denise’s work and many of her poems are about specific areas in the city. Denise is the stanza rep for the Poetry Society the secretary of the Portsmouth Poetry Society. She has been a long time member of the Tongues and Grooves poetry and music club, and often reads her work in public. She has taught creative writing for Portsmouth College, as part of their adult education programme, for twenty eight years, and runs poetry workshops for Portsmouth City Museum and Portsmouth libraries as part of Bookfest. She continues to run poetry workshops in community settings and also facilitates two writing groups for Havant U3A. In 2014, she was involved, alongside local artist and photographer, Jacky Dillon, and other local poets, in a photography and art project, England Remembered about the First World War. This culminated in a presentation at Art Space in Brougham Road, Southsea. In 2019, as part of the Dark Side Port Side project, the digital walking trail called Sailortown she made a poetry film, Blossom Alley which can be heard here. Denise continues to find much inspiration for her poetry in the city.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions about the map entries please contact the Map Director Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk