Maurice Rutherford obituary | hair

The works of the poet Maurice Rutherford, who has died aged 103, range from love poems and elegies to his late wife, to affectionate and witty, but sometimes politically acute, responses to the poems of Philip Larkin, and demonstrate that a poet can be a master of language and form without compromising the authentic voice of working-class experience.

Morris did not experience poetry until he was in his 50s, during a 10-year period of volunteer service with the Samaritans. As the branch’s publicist, one of his duties was to produce the monthly internal newsletter, and he decided to print, anonymously, a comic tale in verse form. When he asked a colleague who was a grammar school teacher what he thought of the contributor’s effort, the answer was dismissive: It wasn’t rhyme or rhyme! Maurice decided to accept the challenge.

Profession of an industrial technical writer, he knew something about shipbuilding. Now he will study the craft of building hair. In the public library, discover the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Poetry, chosen by Larkin. He bought the book, the first collection of poems he ever owned.

At this point, the poets who caught his attention were those who wrote poignantly about their experiences in World War II, such as Charles Causley, Keith Douglas, Vernon Scannell, and especially Henry Reid, whose poem Naming the Parts showed Morris a picture of his own life as an 18-year-old conscript in charge of his first rifle.

Morris’s poetic skills and public presence flourished. Most importantly, he delved into the works of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, and developed his “ear” for the music of the language. Attend courses run by the Arvon Foundation. There were successes in poetry competitions, and increasing appearances in literary magazines.

In 1982 he published his first collection, Slipping the Tugs, with Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts, bringing to life the streets of Hull and its people, the ‘rusted’ ships and ‘drifting estuary’, the ‘quiet men’ and their war stories.

His subsequent publications are This Day Is Dawn (1989), Love is a World of Four Letters (1994), After the Show (1996), And Saturday is Christmas, New and Selected Poems (2011) and The Other Side of Philip Larkin (2012). Readers, critics and poets were enthusiastic. Causley, reviewing This Day Dawning, described Rutherford as having a “completely original voice, emphatic, wide-ranging, deeply moving and arresting, as well as often very funny”.

Morris shared a birth year with Larkin, but had a very different experience in Hull, East Yorkshire, the city where Larkin spent most of his life and where Morris was born. He clearly enjoyed writing as one of the ordinary people described by Larkin as the “cut-price crowd”. In his poem ‘A View from Hesle Road’, dedicated to Jean Hartley (Larkin Hull’s publisher), he tweaks some of Larkin’s words with sinister intent, imagining the local response to ‘the late poet of Hull’: ‘Ozzie?… / ‘We never heard of them in the Eysle Road.’ / No, nonsense. “Boitsara… a crowd!” However, Morris, who, like Larkin, did not belong to any poetic movement, admired and learned much from his contemporaries. They were both accomplished technicians, and although realists, they were able to write with great lyrical sensitivity, especially when observing the natural world.

Maurice was the son of Evelyn Rutherford, the manager of a cod processing company in Hull, and his wife Maud (née Rawson), and had three siblings, one of whom, Barbara, wrote historical novels. He enjoyed poetry at school, but opportunities were limited: he left Hull Commercial College at 16 to work as a clerk at Hull Graving Dock. His service in the Second World War was initially with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and later with the Royal Armored Corps, where his duties took him to Italy and North Africa. He left with a perfect record.

His wife, Olive Gray, was in the Women’s Land Army in Sussex during the war. She and Maurice met at a dance, married in 1947, and had two children, Ian and Jenny. Morris’s post-war career continued in the shipbuilding and engineering industries of Humberside where he was a technical clerk, preparing accounts and estimates for ship repair. He took early retirement in 1986, when Humber Graving Dock, in Immingham, Lincolnshire, was liquidated, and he moved from Grimsby back to Yorkshire.

In 2016, he collaborated with artist Jenny, on Marshall Reflections, a diverse collection of short prose reflections and new poems. He is also a talented photographer and, with the help of his granddaughter Katie and leading music industry photographer Dan North, curated an exhibition of his rhyming poems and accompanying photographs, which was held at the Cliffs in Cliftonville, Kent in 2019.

In 2023, at the age of 100, Morris, who was blind at the time, was honored by the University of Hull with an honorary doctorate. Before he heard about the honor, he had a dream, which he recorded in a poem that ends by imagining, “The day my parents would have loved me, / My mother wearing the cherry hat and the lemon glove, / My father standing taller than he is tall, / Ready for this dream to stand firm with the morning light.” Yes, it rhymes and sweeps – but what’s most memorable is the sharp vision and undying love of two proud parents.

Working at the Larkin Center at the University of Hull for a while, I had the pleasure of discovering Morris’s poetry and meeting him in person. I’ve featured it twice in The Guardian’s Poems of the Week series: Autumn Walks in 2009 and Mists in 2022.

Olive died in 2012. Maurice is survived by Ian and Jenny, and is survived by two grandchildren, Katie and Alec, and four great-grandchildren.