University of Liverpool acquires entire archive of poet Roger McGough

Archivist Jo Klett says the 40 boxes of material will provide ‘a full picture of Roger’s entire working career’“It’s a joy to be old,” wrote Roger McGough, one of Britain’s most popular, prolific and funniest poets. “The dog dead and the car sold.”Another joy might be decluttering. After the departure of dozens of boxes of notebooks, manuscripts, drafts, project files, journals, posters, letters, personal artworks and more, McGough has admitted his house is significantly emptier. “If anyone wants to buy some old empty filing cabinets then get in touch … through you,” he joked.The University of Liverpool has announced it has acquired McGough’s entire archive. It already had a mass of personal papers relating to his life up to 2007. Now it has taken delivery of material accumulated since then, and items such as travel journals that he had been reluctant to give up first time round.McGough, 88, said it was an “honour to be asked”, adding: “Where else but Liverpool, really.”McGough was a teacher when he formed The Scaffold, of Lily the Pink fame, with Mike McCartney and John Gorman in the 1960s. He was also one of the three Liverpool poets, with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, to feature in The Mersey Sound, one of the bestselling poetry anthologies of all time.Over his career McGough has published more than 100 poetry books for adults and children over his career and has hosted Radio 4’s Poetry Please for more than 25 years.The archive shines light on important moments of cultural history and includes correspondence with a wide variety of people, including Victoria Wood, Eric Idle, Harold Wilson, Esther Rantzen and Philip Larkin.Larkin had a reputation as being weird and miserable but McGough, who was a student at the University of Hull when Larkin was the librarian, has fonder memories and remembers kindness and encouragement.“He would say take no notice of what critics are going to say before I even knew there were going to be critics. He said: ‘Ignore them, do what you do and go on doing it’.“This is what I’ve tried to do in my own writing.”Larkin later wrote to McGough, poet to poet. “He wrote a nice thing saying: ‘Very pleased to see your latest volume is more well-thumbed than mine. Congratulations.’”Also in the archive is material that shines light on McGough’s involvement in the Beatles’ 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, which the Guardian described as a “rather pretentious piece of popular entertainment” at the time.McGough was asked to “Liverpudlianise” the script. “By the time I was brought in, there had been 17 writers and the Beatles didn’t like it,” he said. “It was too American.”He was paid a fee but it was always made clear by US producers that there would be no credit, and there are to-and fro letters to that effect in the archive. “These things happen,” McGough said. “It didn’t worry me at the time, but a credit would have meant more money. I’d be in LA now surrounded by models on a beach, not talking to you.”McGough said items in the archive stirred up many emotions and memories, including things he had forgotten about.One was a strange 1976 play for Thames TV, which McGough has discovered he wanted to call Your Dinner Has Gone to the Hairdressers, I am in the Oven. “It was a great title but I had to change it to the The Life Swappers,” he said.Among more than 40 large boxes of material in the second tranche are hundreds of diaries McGough kept whenever he travelled. “What happened to me, where I went, what I read, what I wore, what I ate. A lot of it was quite boring, but a lot of it was quite interesting and funny.”There is also an undated, but 1960s, brooding self-portrait McGough made of himself.The archive announcement was timed to celebrate World Poetry Day on Saturday.The material joins nearly two miles of archives held by the university, including Europe’s largest catalogued collection of science fiction material and the Cunard archive.The university’s archivist, Jo Klett, said the latest McGough material would be catalogued and made available to view to help provide “a full picture of Roger’s entire working career”.Asked to provide a comment to the university on the archive acquisition, McGough naturally chose verse.“Seeking a suitable quote, I delved deep into my University of Liverpool archive. Unfortunately, without success! Will this do? ‘Honoured and Excited?’”