INTRODUCTION
Towards the end of the summer of 1906 I received a letter from Mr. F. A. Mumby, of the Daily Graphic, asking me if I knew if Joseph Fletcher, the “Posh” of the “FitzGerald” letters, was still alive. All about me were veterans of eighty, ay, and ninety! hale and garrulous as any longshoreman needs be. But it had never occurred to me before that possibly the man who was Edward FitzGerald’s “Image of the Mould that Man was originally cast in,” the east coast fisherman for whom the great translator considered no praise to be too high, might be within easy reach.
My first discovery was that to most of the good people of Lowestoft the name of the man who had honoured the town by his preference was unknown. A solicitor
in good practice, a man who is by way of being an author himself, asked me (when I named FitzGerald to him) if I meant that FitzGerald who had, he believed, made a lot of money out of salt! A schoolmaster had never heard of either FitzGerald or Omar.
It was plain that the educated classes of Lowestoft could help me in my search but little. So I went down to the harbour basins and the fish wharves, and asked of “Posh” and his “governor.”
Not a jolly boatman of middle age in the harbour but knew of both. “D’ye mean Joe Fletcher, master?” said one of them. “What—old Posh? Why yes! Alive an’ kickin’, and go a shrimpin’ when the weather serve. He live up in Chapel Street. Number tew. He lodge theer.”
So up I went to Chapel Street, one of those streets in the old North Town of Lowestoft which have seen better days. A wizened, bent, white-haired old lady
answered my knock, after a preliminary inspection from a third-floor window of my appearance. This, I learnt afterwards, was old Mrs. Capps, with whom Posh had lodged since the death of his wife, fourteen years previously.
“You’ll find him down at the new basin,” said the old lady. “He’s mostly there this time o’ day.”
But there was no Posh at the new basin. Half a dozen weather-beaten shrimpers (in their brown jumpers, and with the fringe of hair running beneath the chin from ear to ear—that hirsute ornament so dear to East Anglian fishermen) were lounging about the wharf, or mending the small-meshed trawl-nets wherein they draw what spoil they may from the depleted roads.