John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs (1918–2006), poet, was born at Streatham Manor, Leigham Avenue, Streatham, London, on 9 July 1918, the elder son of Francis Heath-Stubbs, of independent means, and his wife, Edith Louise Sara, née Marr. At this time his parents lived at 5 Ranulf Road, Hampstead. His father had qualified as a solicitor but never practised. His mother was a concert pianist of distinction, as Edie Marr. She gave up her professional career after her son was born but became a music teacher when her husband developed multiple sclerosis and their private income was reduced by the depression of the 1930s. Music was to play a major part in her son's life and poetry.
When he was eighteen Heath-Stubbs was diagnosed with glaucoma, unusual in one so young, inherited from his father. After an operation he lost the sight of his right eye but retained some vision in the left, which he was able to use for reading until 1961. He bore this misfortune with great stoicism and overcame the disability to a remarkable degree, becoming phenomenally well read. After the operation he was sent to Worcester College for the Blind where he learned Braille, though he never used it. He became editor of the college magazine and, most important, he came into contact with boys of a working-class background and began with them his lifelong enjoyment of beer-drinking and of mixing freely with people of all social classes in pubs. Meanwhile his parents had heard of the Barker exhibition at Queen's College, Oxford, given to someone who was either blind or in danger of losing his sight, to read English. Heath-Stubbs was awarded the exhibition in 1939 and at the age of twenty-one went to Oxford.
After leaving Oxford Heath-Stubbs went to live in London, taking lodgings in a boarding-house in west Hampstead. Poetry was his vocation but he needed a job. He obtained one as a schoolmaster at The Hall preparatory school, where he read The Ancient Mariner to his pupils but found keeping them in order at other times to be beyond him. He resigned halfway through his second term. His next job was on a popular illustrated encyclopaedia in preparation at Hutchinson. He contributed articles not only on literature, music, and theology but also on plants, birds, insects, and cookery. He was also commissioned to write a book about Edgar Allan Poe but gave it up when it was half-written, having, as he put it, 'seen through Poe'. He gave up the Hutchinson job, too, after eighteen months, and apart from temporary university appointments became a freelance for the rest of his life.
His poems and articles appeared in Wrey Gardiner's Poetry Quarterly, Hugh Kingsmill's New English Review, and above all in John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing. He gave readings of his poetry with other poets, including Dylan Thomas, George Barker, and James Kirkup, at the Ethical Church in Bayswater. His work was noticed by Edith Sitwell who, when she was in London, invited him to luncheons at the Sesame Club. He encountered T. S. Eliot, who asked him to edit The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Verse, which he compiled with his Oxford friend David Wright, a poet who was deaf. With Wright he also edited, for Lehmann's publishing imprint, The Forsaken Garden, an anthology of English poetry from 1824 to 1905. His critical study of some of the poets of this period was published in 1950 as The Darkling Plain.
After three years at Leeds Heath-Stubbs was made visiting professor of English literature at the University of Alexandria in Egypt. His next appointments were at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960–61, and then as a lecturer in London at the College of St Mark and St John, Chelsea. Another part-time teaching post followed at Merton College, Oxford, where John Jones, whom he had met as one of William Bell's friends, was the fellow in English.
