Brian Bransom Griffiths

Scholar who gave new energy to the study of the dialect of Northeast England

Bill Griffiths was a gifted and eccentric poet, publisher and Anglo-Saxon scholar who late in his career moved from London to Northeast England where he reinvigorated the study of the region's dialect.

He was also an accomplished book designer, small press publisher, biker, houseboat owner, pianist, archivist and social historian.

Brian Bransom Griffiths, known to all as Bill, was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, in 1948. He went to Kingsbury Grammar School and then University College London, where he graduated in Mediaeval and Modern History.

But to those who knew him in the poetry world, he appeared to have come out of nowhere; via his first publication in Poetry Review under the editorship of Eric Mottram in the early 1970s.

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His poem Cycle 1, encapsulates his characteristic off-beat style. “You're you/ and I ain't anyone but you/ The bright carzy rings in agate/ spring is”.There are hints of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson in his work (he also cited Michael McClure and Muriel Rukeyser as influences) but Griffiths's poetry has always had a large element of sui generis about it, not least in its odd and touching innocence.

The reputation grew as it went before him: he had ridden with biker gangs, knew several Hell's Angels personally, he had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles. Once, while riding with the Harrow Roadrats in north-west London he was stopped by the police and remanded briefly in Brixton prison for possessing a small pocket-knife which he claimed to be using as a pencil-sharpener.

All these things, however, were calculated to provoke a frisson of fear among poetry audiences, who were therefore unprepared for the gentle, dry-humoured man that he was, let alone his formidable intellect and lightly worn erudition.

During the 1970s Griffiths performed with the celebrated sound poets Bob Cobbing and Paula Claire in the ensemble Konkrete Canticle, while working at the print shop in the Poetry Society, London. He also kick-started the Pirate Press, publishing handmade mimeographed books of his own and others' poetry, as well as political pamphlets.

Griffiths belonged to no political orthodoxy, himself, but strongly identified with the downtrodden and oppressed; his personal acts of kindness to others in trouble, despite his own poverty at times, were well known to friends. Pirate Press later gave way to Amra Imprint, named after his houseboat moored on the Grand Union Canal at Cowley in which he lived.

His growing interest in Old and Middle English poetry led him to part-time study at King's College London, where Eric Mottram taught, and he received his doctorate in Old English in 1987. In 1975 he had published John Porter's translation of Beowulf as a Pirate Press book, with a cover drawing by Jeff Nuttall. He translated Guthlac B, the Old English poem on the death of St Guthlac (Spectacular Diseases, 1985) and edited The Battle of Maldon.

In his introduction to a selection of Griffiths's poetry in the volume Future Exiles (briefly in print from Paladin Books in 1992), Nuttall wrote that it “perpetually dazzles and astonishes in exactly the way the great stained-glass windows of European cathedrals dazzle and astonish before the eye has recognised whatever image is depicted”.

Nuttall also compared his method to “the way in which a saxophonist like John Coltrane will rephrase a melody relentlessly”. Griffiths, a gifted pianist, shrugged off the jazz attribution — he preferred the 19th-century classical repertoire and liked nothing better than to play four-handed pieces by Brahms and Chopin.

In the late 1980s disaster struck when the houseboat Amra, in dock for maintenance, was destroyed by fire as a result of a welder's carelessness. Griffiths lost most of his papers, and also the specialist Anglo-Saxon typewriter he had worked on when living on board. When the insurance money finally arrived, he found that, although it would not replace his home in London or the Southeast it was just about enough to buy a small property near the coast in Seaham, Co Durham, to which he moved in the early 1990s.

He made contact with Tom and Connie Pickard and the Morden Tower poetry venue in Newcastle, and also started working for the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University, where Bill Lancaster admired his talent for serious scholarship which also had an appeal to a popular audience.

This year Griffiths's dictionary of Northumbrian miners' dialect, The Talk of the North East Coalfields, led to him being interviewed on television, and being described in the press as the country's ”foremost Geordie scholar”.

Because his work was published in small press editions, much of Griffiths' huge output of more than 80 volumes of poetry is all but unobtainable today, at least in its original form. This is a loss, as these tiny Pirate Press and Amra Imprint editions were beautiful, endlessly inventive in their design, often involving his own drawings and sometimes hand-coloured. His 1978 prose poem, A History of the Solar System / Fragmentswas published by Pirate Press in conjunction with Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum press as a single, continuous, hand-sewn concertinaed page.

Some poetry is now available in better distributed volumes, such as A Book of Spilt Cities and The Mud Fort, and he did not live to see the launch of The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths.

Brian Bransom Griffiths, scholar, was born on August 20, 1948. He died of a heart attack on September 13, 2007, aged 59

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