Gould Adams Scratton, B. M. (Bride M.)

Evelyn St. Bride Mary Goold-Adams (or Gould Adams) Scratton (1882-1964) was a writer and friend of Ezra Pound. A collection of her sketches, England (1923), was published by Three Mountains Press.

Peter Whigham (1925-1982) was a poet, translator and friend of Ezra Pound. Best known for his translations of Latin poetry, Whigham taught comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 until his death. His first wife was Jean Scratton, a niece of Bride Scratton.

From the description of Bride Scratton/Peter Whigham papers, 1894-1966. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 702171716

Evelyn St. Bride Mary Goold-Adams (or Gould Adams) Scratton (1882-1964) was a writer and friend of Ezra Pound. A collection of her sketches, England (1923), was published by Three Mountains Press.

Peter Whigham (1925-1982) was a poet, translator and friend of Ezra Pound. Best known for his translations of Latin poetry, Whigham taught comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 until his death. His first wife was Jean Scratton, a niece of Bride Scratton.

From the description of Bride Scratton/Peter Whigham papers, 1894-1966. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 77948801

Evelyn St. Bride Mary Goold-Adams was born in Shoeburyness, Essex on September 9, 1882, the only daughter of Evelyn Wynne Goold-Adams and Captain Francis Michael Goold-Adams, Assistant Superintendent of Experiments at the Royal Army's Gunnery School. Goold-Adams was killed in 1885 when a shell exploded prematurely, and Evelyn's mother remarried shortly thereafter and moved with her daughter to London. Bride attended a finishing school in Fontainebleau, was presented at Court, and met Edward ("Ned") Blackburn Scratton during one of her visits to Tulloch Lodge, owned by Sir Henry Oldham. She and Ned Scratton, an avid golfer who had inherited Prittlewell Priory in Essex, were married at St. Peter's Kensington on May 4, 1905.

The Scrattons settled first at Prittlewell Priory, and later moved to York. The couple had four children, the eldest of whom, a daughter, was diagnosed with mental retardation at an early age and raised apart from the rest of the family. Scratton served with the 1st Devon Yeomanry during World War I and saw service at Gallipoli; Bride was a volunteer at one of the military hospitals in York. In 1917, after Scratton demobilized, the family moved to Oxford, where Bride became friends with the novelist Mrs. Victor Rickard, who introduced her to Ezra Pound.

The Scrattons' marriage was troubled, and they seem to have lived apart after the war. Bride visited Paris, where the Pounds were living, in 1921 and again in 1922. In 1923 she visited Italy, likewise while Pound was there. In later years she remembered sitting with Pound and Eliot in a café in Verona, an incident said to be recalled in several lines of Canto LXXVIII. ("....So we sat there by the arena,/outside, Thiy and il decaduto.....")

Ned Scratton received a judgement of divorce on the grounds of adultery and custody of the couple's children in October 1923. Ezra Pound was the named co-respondent. Three weeks after the judgement, Ned Scratton married Gwen Stabler, whom he had met in Scarborough in the preceding year.

Bride moved to London and worked at a series of jobs, including saleswoman at Peter Jones, Ltd. and at the Claridge Gallery. She also wrote several short stories and articles. England, a collection of country house sketches, was published by Three Mountains Press in 1923, and her short story "Uncle Bertram" appeared in the February 1924 issue of Transatlantic Review. She became a Christian Scientist during this period.

Ned Scratton died of tuberculosis in May 1926 and Bride regained custody of her children over the objections of his widow and of the Scratton family. In 1929 the family moved to Cambridge, where she became a registered guide with the British Travel and Holiday Association; participated in amateur theatricals; and was Branch Secretary of the local chapter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She remained in occasional touch with Pound; her niece, Jean Scratton, married Peter Whigham, who became a close friend of the Pounds in the 1950s.

Bride Scratton died of cancer in Cambridge on May 6, 1964.

Peter George Whigham, translator and poet, was born in Oxford and held a variety of jobs during his early career, including gardener, actor, and reporter for a Welsh newspaper. In 1949, while teaching at Worth Priory, he met and married fellow teacher Jean Scratton, a niece of Bride Scratton.

During the 1950s Whigham continued to teach, began to write poetry, and made contact with Ezra Pound, then confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane. His interest in Pound was reflected in a series of BBC scripts he coauthored, including "Cathay" and "On Democracy." With Denis Goacher, another Pound disciple, Whigham edited Pound's translation of Women of Trachis (1956); produced a joint collection of poems, Clear Lake Comes from Enjoyment (1959); and published The Marriage Rite: Catullus, Rimbaud (1960), which contained Whigham's earliest translation of Catullus.

After Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's, the Whigham family visited him in Italy and settled at Castel Brünnenburg at the invitation of Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound's daughter. In 1966 Whigham published The Poems of Catullus ; he and his family left Italy in the following year and settled in California. After an appointment as visiting lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Whigham joined the comparative literature department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, where he taught until his death.

The Whighams separated shortly after their arrival in Santa Barbara, and Whigham married Priscilla Minn in 1969. During the next two decades, Whigham published several collections of original poems, translations from Latin poets, including Martial and Juvenal, and an edition of The Music of the Troubadours (1980). His Things Common, Properly: Selected Poems 1942-1982 was published by Black Swan Press in 1984. Peter Whigham was killed in an automobile accident in Orleans, California on July 6, 1987.

From the guide to the Bride Scratton/Peter Whigham papers, 1894-1966, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)