What do Saigon, The Beatles, poetry and a slum street in Hull have in common? Our conflict photography correspondent Angus Young rediscovers some amazing pictures.
In the summer of England’s World Cup win in 1966, an aspiring Scottish poet became a mature student at Hull University. Douglas Dunn arrived in Hull to study English and, as a fan of Philip Larkin’s poetry, had already managed to have a couple of his own poems published in magazines. Dunn and his wife used their savings to buy a house in a tiny terrace off Terry Street on Beverley Road.
The couple lived there for two years despite their neighbourhood being declared as unfit for human habitation because of the poor condition of the so-called ‘slum’ housing. His experience there inspired his first collection of verse, titled Terry Street. Published in 1969, the book launched him on the road to international acclaim.
Prior to publication, half a dozen of Dunn’s poems appeared in London Magazine accompanied by six photographs of the Terry Street area taken in 1968 by Robert Whitaker. Whitaker was best known for his photographs of The Beatles, including the image used for the cover of the band’s US-only album Yesterday and Today. He would later cover wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and the war of independence in Bangladesh.
Whitaker spent a day in Hull on his commission to illustrate Dunn’s poetry. He said: “Douglas had written his poetry with sympathy, dignity, humour and love, not only about his immediate neighbours but also about his surroundings. His poetry was visual which was a great help for me. It was a simple task for me to record what I saw. I remember making a comment to my girlfriend at the time: ‘What a pleasure to illustrate these simple, precise words’. I spent maybe 45 minutes, three and a half rolls of 35mm 36 exposure film. I was very happy with the day’s work.”
London Magazine used just six of his photographs and his hopes of a book combining all of his images and Dunn’s poems never materialised. “The years passed by and I thought that my Terry Street photographs were doomed to end on a tip, in a plastic bag somewhere in Sussex, after my death.”
In 1994 he received a letter out of the blue from Dr John Osborne, a lecturer at Hull University and co-founder of the Philip Larkin Society, enquiring about the Terry Street photographs. “He believed that I was the cameraman who had photographed the ‘slum’ area called Terry Street.” Whitaker recalled. “In his letter Dr Osborne mentioned that Douglas Dunn had heard a rumour that I had been killed while working as a photographer in Vietnam for Time & Life magazine. I was badly wounded in Vietnam, however, not killed.”
At the time, Dr Osborne was publishing Bete Noire, his own Hull-based poetry magazine and eventually devoted an entire edition to Terry Street, featuring 18 Dunn poems alongside 60 of Whitaker’s photographs. The edition immediately sold out, prompting a later exhibition of both the poems and the photographs at the Ferens Art Gallery.
“Rarely in art history can two distinguished practitioners in entirely different media have brought their skills to bear on a single subject,” wrote Dr Osborne in a special exhibition programme. “Whereas Dunn’s picture of Terry Street is predominantly sombre but relieved by spots of brightness, in Whitaker the proportions are reversed, the vibrancy of the people exceeding the constraints of their impoverishment. In this way, the perspectives of poet and photographer complement one another beautifully and the work of each is enhanced.”
The old terraced housing and the way of life of the people who lived in them captured by Dunn and Whitaker disappeared in the mid-1970s thanks to a council demolition programme. In the 1996 exhibition programme, Whitaker said he was thrilled to see the poetry and images together again. “For me they work together just as well as they did in 1968. Maybe in 200 years they will still tell a story. I still have yearnings for the people who lived in these dignified surroundings. We all have problems, Terry Street was never a ‘slum’ to me.”
Angus Young
- Douglas Dunn is a poet, academic and critic. He was awarded an OBE in 2003.
- Robert Whitaker largely retired from photography in the 1970s to become a farmer. He died in 2011 after a long illness.
- Dr John Osborne remains an active member of the Philip Larkin Society and runs an independent publishing company.
