| Admin History | Ted Hughes (1930-1998), poet laureate, was born at Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930, the son of William Henry Hughes and Edith Farrar Hughes. He was educated at Mexborough Grammar School, having moved there in 1937, when his father opened a newsagent's shop. In 1948 he won a scholarship to Cambridge, and read English at Pembroke College before changing to Archaeology and Anthropology, graduating in 1954. At Cambridge he met Sylvia Plath (d 1963), whom he married in 1956. The year after his marriage his first book of poetry, 'The Hawk in the Rain', was published by Faber and Faber to widespread acclaim. A number of increasingly diverse publications followed, including childrens' stories and poetry, librettos and poetry. After a short period in London and the USA he moved to Devon in 1961. In 1970 he married his second wife, Carol Orchard, who survived him. He became Poet Laureate in 1984, and received the Order of Merit just before his death. He died in London in October 1998. By his first wife he had one son and one daughter.
Leonard Baskin was born in 1922 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and brought up in Brooklyn. He had his first exhibition of sculpture in New York at the age of seventeen and went on to study at Yale University followed by the New School for Social Research between 1941 and 1949. In 1953 he began teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1974. During that period he founded Gehenna Press, a small private press specializing in fine book production. He moved to Tiverton, Devon in 1974 close to his friend, Ted Hughes, and stayed till 1983 when he returned to America. He died in 2000.
Hughes and Baskin worked in close collaboration on Hughes' collection of poems entitled 'Cave Birds', also held in Special Collections (EUL MS 58).
Noel Chanan (1939- ) initially studied photography at college, but subsequently (following four years at the BBC 1962-1966) pursued a thirty-five year career as a freelance documentary film-maker, both as a director and an editor. Included in his output as a director have been a number of films about photography, including an award-winning portrait of South African photographer David Goldblatt; biopics of English photographers George Rodger and Bert Hardy; a series on the history of nineteenth century photography and another on pioneers of cinema. Retiring from active film-making in 1998, Chanan has now returned to photography full-time, with three solo exhibitions between 1998 and 2003, writings on the history of photography, exhibition curating and teaching. His photograph of Ted Hughes at Lurley Manor won the Lord Scott of Portswood Award at the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts 2002 Open Competition, and three of his photographic portraits are held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Noel Chanan lives in North Devon.
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