JACK B. YEATS, R.H.A. | TWO INK DRAWINGS FOR A BROADSIDE

Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats – His Cartoon and Illustrations, items 1869 and 1872

Reproduced in A Broadside number 7 fourth year (December 1911) and number 8 fourth year (January 1912) respectively.

If W.B. Yeats was the revered literary mentor for the young John Masefield, it was Jack B. Yeats who was the confidant, friend and collaborator for the young writer. As noted by Hilary Pyle, ‘With the poet John Masefield [Jack B.] Yeats built up a juvenile drama of the high seas and piracy that Masefield incorporated into his poetry, Yeats used for illustrative purposes, and later employed as subject-matter for some of his finest oils’ (Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats a biography, London, 1989, p. 73). Philip W. Errington states ‘…in contrast to Masefield's connections to W.B. Yeats, the friendship with Jack Yeats was the friendship of escapism and the desperately juvenile which enabled a release upon which both men thrived’ (see Errington, ‘McGowan’s Code: Deciphering John Masefield and Jack B. Yeats’, ed. Warwick Gould, Yeats Annual 13, London, 1998, p. 308).

In April 1903 Masefield stayed for two weeks in South Devon with Jack Yeats. In a letter from Masefield to his future wife he noted ‘We were up late last night writing Cashlauna ballads [the Yeats’ cottage was named Cashlauna Shelmiddy (“Snail’s Castle”)]… I made two or three about… a scoundrel named Theodor [sic] who comes into an old penny dreadful that is Sunday reading here.’ (see Babington Smith, John Masefield – a life, Oxford, 1978, p.80). As noted by Masefield’s biographer, ‘soon the ‘Theodore’ ballads led on to a Theodore cult. For years JM and Jack Yeats regaled one another with the adventures, feuds, amours, whimsies, and misdemeanours of their legendary buccaneer. Several Theodore ballads were published… but for the most part his doings were recorded – both in doggerel and amusing sketches – in the letters between them…’

‘The Pirate Sentry’, as offered here, is Theodore the pirate cabin-boy. The code scrawled on the wall spells ‘Constanza Pity Me’ (see Errington, ‘McGowan’s Code: Deciphering John Masefield and Jack B. Yeats’, ed. Warwick Gould, Yeats Annual No 13, London, 1998, p. 311).