Norman Nicholson

Although he had been regarded as one of the most brilliant school students in Cumberland his poor health prevented him from attending university and instead he devoted his life to writing.

Nicholson was influenced by the social and religious community around the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Millom, to which belonged Rosetta Sobey, who became his stepmother in 1922.

He was married in 1956 to Yvonne Edith Gardner (died 1982), a teacher who had consulted him about a school production of his play The Old Man of the Mountains.

His poetry collections include Rock Face (1948), The Pot Geranium (1954), A Local Habitation (1972), and Sea to the West (1981).

Some of the poems in Five Rivers foreshadow verse plays of his – The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), A Match for the Devil (1955) and Birth by Drowning (1960) – placing the Bible in a distinctly Cumbrian setting.

His descriptive poetry can be remarkably vivid: Above the collar of crags, The granite pate breaks bare to the sky Through a tonsure of bracken and bilberry.

(From "Eskdale Granite") Nicholson's Lake District comprises not only the National Park but also the industrial coastal towns of Millom, Egremont, Whitehaven, Bootle and Askam.

[5] His admirers included T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, who wrote in a poem of tribute: ...those Cumbrian phonetics cracked like a plaited whip until the slack, nostalgic ambler in me trotted

This is a land where dirt is clean And poison pasture, quick and green, And storm sky, bright and bare; Where sewers flow with milk, and meat is carved up for the fire to eat, And children suffocate in God's fresh air.

A memorial stained-glass window created by Christine Boyce can be found in St George's Church, Millom and there is a bust of Nicholson in Carlisle Cathedral.