About Dock Leaves

Dock Leaves

Dock Leaves was a Welsh literary magazine published at Pembroke Dock from 1949. It was founded and first edited by the poet Raymond Garlick, who taught at the town's county school, and its very name was a local joke and a statement of intent: a review of Welsh arts and letters, rooted in the dockyard town where its editor lived and worked. In the later 1950s the magazine was renamed The Anglo-Welsh Review, under which title it continued until 1988.

The batch record for Dock Leaves gives its independent life as 1949 to 1957. That is the span during which the magazine appeared under the Dock Leaves title before the renaming; the publication itself, as The Anglo-Welsh Review, ran on for another three decades, and its history is usually told, as here, as one continuous story from 1949 to 1988.

Founding at Pembroke Dock in 1949

Raymond Garlick (1926–2011) moved to Pembroke Dock in April 1949 to take up a post teaching English at Pembroke Dock County School, under Roland Mathias, the poet and headmaster who became his collaborator. That same year, at the age of twenty-three, Garlick became a co-founder of Dock Leaves, and he was its first editor from 1949 to 1960.

The original title was, as the magazine's later history explains, a reference to the fact that it was published in Pembroke Dock, the town in which its founding editor lived and taught in the local school. A literary review edited by a young schoolteacher from a small Pembrokeshire town was, in 1949, a deliberate act of cultural decentralisation: Welsh writing in English was not going to be edited only from London or Cardiff.

A national review of Welsh arts and letters

Dock Leaves described itself, in the words preserved on a surviving issue, as a national review in English of Welsh arts and letters. Its pages carried poetry, fiction, essays and reviews concerned with the culture of Wales in English — the body of writing that its editors were in the process of naming and defining as Anglo-Welsh literature.

An early landmark was the Dylan Thomas number: volume five, number thirteen, published in spring 1954, was devoted to Dylan Thomas. Its contents, as recorded in a bookseller's description of the issue, included work by or contributions involving Saunders Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Glyn Jones, Henry Treece, A. G. Prys-Jones, Roland Mathias and Garlick himself — a cross-section of the Welsh and Anglo-Welsh literary world of the moment, gathered in a forty-page stapled review from Pembroke Dock.

Defining Anglo-Welsh literature

Dock Leaves did more than publish Anglo-Welsh writing; it argued the category into existence. An editorial in the magazine in 1952 expressed the hope that someone would persuade a publishing house to put forth a badly needed anthology of Anglo-Welsh poetry. Garlick, together with his fellow founder Roland Mathias, eventually published such an anthology themselves: their Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480–1980 later defined the term as denoting a literature in which the first element of the compound specifies the language and the second the provenance of the writing.

The form Anglo-Welsh had been used by Idris Bell in 1922, but it was Garlick and Mathias who revived it when they renamed their periodical, and who used the magazine to identify a tradition of writing in English in Wales reaching back centuries — distinct from Welsh-language literature, with its own continuous tradition, and distinct, too, from English literature in general.

The renaming as The Anglo-Welsh Review

In 1957 — Garlick's own biographical record gives the renaming as taking effect from 1958 — Dock Leaves became The Anglo-Welsh Review. The name change reflected the editor's work in defining the Anglo-Welsh tradition, and it also placed the magazine in a line of succession with The Welsh Review (1939–1948), whose role as Wales's English-language literary review it was inheriting.

The change of title was also a change of scale. The punning local name of a schoolteacher's review gave way to a title that claimed national coverage of a whole literature — a claim the magazine spent the next thirty years making good.

Roland Mathias and the 1960s

Roland Mathias took over the editorship in 1960, when Garlick's eleven-year tenure ended. By that time the magazine was financially supported by the Welsh Arts Council, and it had become more substantial both in the number of its pages and in the breadth of its coverage of Welsh cultural life.

Garlick himself had by then moved on: he had taught at Blaenau Ffestiniog from 1954, published his first books of poems in the Dock Leaves years — Poems from the Mountain House (1950), The Welsh-Speaking Sea (1954) and Requiem for a Poet (1954) — and begun broadcasting for the BBC, a career that the editorship had helped to launch by putting him in contact with many writers in Welsh and English.

The review section and the later editors

A distinctive feature of the later magazine was the growth of its book review section. That growth was an attempt to provide coverage of all aspects of Welsh life, but it also created an apprenticeship ladder inside the magazine: a succession of reviews editors took on a substantial editorial role, moved gradually towards co-editing, and then took over as main editor.

Gillian Clarke joined Roland Mathias as Reviews Editor in 1973 and became editor in 1976. Greg Hill joined her as Reviews Editor in 1980 and himself became editor in 1985. The process is well documented in the memoirs of all three editors — Clarke, Mathias and Hill — an unusually complete internal record for a small national review. Garlick, too, had published his own account of the magazine's early years in 1971.

The end in 1988 and the successor

The Anglo-Welsh Review ceased publication in 1988. Its place was taken the same year by New Welsh Review, founded in 1988 as successor to The Welsh Review, Dock Leaves and The Anglo-Welsh Review alike — a line of succession that runs from 1939 to the present-day Welsh literary magazine.

Later terminology has moved on from the magazine's central term: the phrase Welsh writing in English has largely replaced Anglo-Welsh literature, because many Welsh writers in English felt the older usage failed to give Welsh status to Welsh people who did not speak Welsh. That debate, too, is part of Dock Leaves's legacy — the magazine named a field, and the field argued with the name.

The anthology work that grew out of the magazine's editorial campaign also had a long life of its own. Garlick and Mathias's selection of Anglo-Welsh poetry, first prompted by that 1952 editorial, was still being issued in an expanded form in the 1990s: a review of Dannie Abse's Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry (1997) treated Garlick and Mathias's Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480–1990 (1993) as the comprehensive anthology that Abse's more modern selection would effectively replace. Few magazine editorials can claim to have set in train a work that remained the standard anthology of its field for forty years.

Legacy

Dock Leaves began in 1949 as a young schoolteacher's review in Pembroke Dock and became, as The Anglo-Welsh Review, the principal literary and cultural magazine of Wales in English for nearly forty years. It published and reviewed the writers who made post-war Welsh writing in English — the tradition of Dylan Thomas's generation and of R. S. Thomas, Roland Mathias, Gillian Clarke and their successors — and it did so from Wales, with Welsh Arts Council support, rather than from London.

For the directory record, Dock Leaves is best understood as the founding title of that long-lived review: eight years under its original, local, punning name, and then three decades under the national name its editors had argued into being.