Great Uncle Alfred (Alf) Priddey (1878-1939)

Alf was the artistic member of his family. Unlike his brothers and sisters he eschewed life on the farm to travel beyond the parish boundaries of Lambwick Hall. In 1907 you would have found him drinking with James Joyce in Trieste, discussing poetry and philosophy. From there he moved to Paris where he debated Christian existentialism with Gabriel Marcel and travelled out to Giverny during the summer months to stay with Claude Monet and his family. At the outbreak of WWI he returned to England and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers where he met Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. After the war he settled in London and worked with Ezra Pound to promote the works of his old friend Joyce. After a major falling out with Pound in 1932 Alf returned to Lambwick Hall. He took up residence in a shed at the back of the Farshott Arms and from that point became an almost permanently drunken denizen of the pub. Although claiming to be an artist there is no evidence that Alf ever created anything than a damp patch at his end of the bar. Alf died of pneumonia in 1939 on the day that Churchill announced that Britain was at war with Germany.