The Lowry Lounge: The 19th Hole, 2015

The Bluecoat's sixth annual celebration of the life and work of Malcolm Lowry combined a walking tour of his Wirral birthplace, led by Colin Dilnot, with a focus on his golfing haunts, a screening of one of Lowry's favourite films, and a second book launch in collaboration with University of Ottawa Press.

Sat 31 Oct 2015

Earlier, in May, one of the Lounge organisers, Helen Tookey gave a paper, ‘Re-placing Malcolm Lowry: from the Mersey to the World (and back again)’, at the Brighton Writes: Place-Based Arts conference at University of Brighton. The essay, which drew on the Lounge's attempts to 're-place' Lowry in his Merseyside landscape, was published later that year in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (8.2-3).

The coach and walking tour of the Wirral during the 2015 Lounge had a golfing theme, and Colin Dilnot devised a route talking in several courses related to the writer's early enthusiasm for the sport. The Bluecoat first drew attention to this in its Lowry centenary programme in 2009, for which this press cutting (Liverpool Echo 12 May 1927) was traced. It shows a seventeen-year-old Lowry, attired in plus fours and wielding a golf club, on the eve of his maiden voyage as a deck hand on board the SS Pyrrhus, bound for the Far East.