Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Lee, Charles & Lewis, D. B. Wyndham

Lee, Charles & Lewis, D. B. Wyndham

(eds.): The Stuffed Owl, [10] 13

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20060601140128 David Eccles - Derek Parker on The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse

The Maladroit Muse

Derek Parker on Charles & Lewis Lee, D. B. Wyndham (eds.), The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse

When I attempted to look up D. B. Wyndham Lewis on the Internet, Google kindly asked me if I didn’t really mean Percy Wyndham Lewis. Emphatically not. The Vorticist painter (whose age, it was suggested, could be estimated by counting the rings on his collar) was not known for his sense of humour. His namesake, on the other hand, was the first ‘Beachcomber’ of the Daily Express, and the collaborator with Ronald Searle on the tales of that least conventional of ladies’ academies, St Trinian’s. But he was overshadowed by his successor, J. B. Morton, and likewise by Searle’s brilliant drawings. DB, however, doesn’t deserve the oblivion into which time appears to be edging him, if only because he was one of the two begetters of an ‘anthology of bad verse’ which he and Charles Lee – a quiet and unobtrusive writer of Cornish novels – entitled The Stuffed Owl.

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