The Portsmouth poet, Denise Bennett, frequently turns to the city’s rich history for her verse, and in this poem she reflects upon a perhaps less well-known naval connection. The Star and Garter stood at 100, Broad Street. It was demolished in 1954 and the site is now occupied by an unprepossessing building that includes Spinnaker Café. This poem focuses on the naval history associated with the pub, and in particular its connection with the ill-fated Admiral John Franklin, whose 1845 expedition to find the North-West Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans north of Canada seized the imagination of mid-Victorian Britain, but ended in cannibalism, death, and misery. The poem’s power lies as much, however, in its depiction of Franklin’s widow, [Jane Franklin] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Franklin) as it does in its reflections on the ill-fated expedition. It is quoted here with the kind permission of the poet.

The Star and Garter

John Franklin was here,
his initials etched in glass
on the window of The Star
along with Admiral How, Lord Nelson
and other famous sailor-names.

His widow Lady Jane
came each year to sleep
in the same rooms they stayed in
before his fateful voyage in ‘45
when he sailed away –

he died in Baffin’s Bay they say,
in his quest to seek a passage
around the pole. His tale is told
through a sailor’s dream
in a broadsheet song.

Yes, John Franklin was here
but his ships, Erebus and Terror
foundered in the Artic garden,
that snow-iced Eden where
he’d followed the North Star.

Sometimes I imagine the hotel
that stood on the waters edge
in years passed, see his hand
score his letters on the glass,
as I listen to Lady Jane sing –

Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
to know on earth, that my Franklin live.

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.

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