Here's an update on the search.

I finally rediscovered the photocopy of the SEA BREEZES article, 1966, that Nobby Dye had kindly sent me in 2006.

I've also unraveled the mystery of the literary critique published in THE BOOKMAN, 1923. The citation is incorrect in my first post. There were at least two "Bookman" publications, one in New York City and one in London, and the fragment in question was from the London publication. I was finally able to access the entire article with the help of a librarian at Colby College here in Maine from their digital archives. It is, indeed, the best contemporary critique we've run across:

Miss Cicely Fox-Smith

Miss Cicely Fox-Smith has almost imperceptibly made her way into the front rank of those who sing of seamen and shipping. Her progress has been as unobtrusive as the rising of the tide. Readers of Punch and other periodicals are accustomed to expect something breezy, something with "the tar and seaweed smell," from a poem over the signature of "C. F. S." But with too many that is the limit of their acquaintance. A few have ventured further and bought one or two of the dainty little volumes of poems by C. Fox-Smith. Had they suspected a feminine authorship it might have added piquancy to their venture, and lent wings to her fame. But the author was obviously a man. What woman would talk about "Rusty red old hookers, going plugging round the world"? Besides, nautical journals found nothing in the poems to quarrel with; all the details were quite correct. Obviously a woman.

Seamen wrote many letters to "C. F. S." testifying that here at last was the genuine thing, something worth reading.

Miss Fox-Smith owes nothing to Masefield. In fact to some extent she is prior to Masefield. Sailor Town, which includes some of her best and most characteristic work – for example, "The Ballad of the Matterhorn," her own favourite, and "Rathlin Head," a great favourite with her critics – was written two years before Salt Water Ballads appeared. Nor, when her Muse leaves the sea for the dry land, does she owe anything to Kipling, as far as she knows, though the perusal of her "Prairie Shepherd" with its refrain,
"Baa, baa, black sheep, no one's fault but your own," is not likely to recall Kipling. "The Route March," with its imprecations on the foreign service boot – "We're 'oppin' and we're 'obblin' to a cock-eyed ragtime tune" – has really nothing in common with Kipling's "Boots." But the same cannot be said of her treatment of the mule -- "the late lamented army mule, you'll meet him in the stew" – which has a strong smack of the verses on the "Commissariat Camuel."

Having said that, you have said all there is to say. The vast majority of Miss Fox-Smith's poems are inspired directly by the living fact, the actual experience.

The "Prairie Shepherd" was connected with an important chapter in Miss Fox-Smith's life. A brother had settled in Alberta, and three years (sic) before the war she and other members of her family went out to join him. Twelve months of that western prairie were enough for them. "Bare and bald and droughty and dusty" it was in summer, and during the interminable winter "the fierce Keewatin whistled over the waste like a flight of geese from the Pole, and the strong breath of the Chinook thundered across the plains." Anyone who wants an unvarnished picture of a settler's life in Alberta should read her story, The City of Hope.

From Alberta to Victoria, B. C., was a pleasant change, and her old enthusiasm for the sea re-awoke as she wandered through "Sailor-Town," got glimpses into the interior of "Chinese Charley's junk store" and listened to

"Little tunes on Chinese fiddles in a quiet street,
Full of dinky Chinese houses."

In due time a return was made to London, and henceforward the ballads introduce themselves familiarly with such phrases as "Limehouse way, the other day" or "Down by Millwall Basin." The singer was in fact haunting the docks and the lower river, gathering that knowledge which she turned to such good account in Sailor Town Days. Loyalty to actual fact makes her introduce the chantey but sparingly into her ballads. "Sacramento" may be accounted one exception and "Heave all together" of "Rolling Home" another. The chantey has gone out with the going of the sailing ship. The few of these that are left are nearly all foreigners, and foreigners don't sing chanteys. But the spirit of the chantey, its rollicking breeziness, pervades her song, mingling with and often overcoming the melancholy of the seaman's ballad, sung, not round the capstan, but "in the tavern window old and brown," the long ballad, as she terms it, "that they generally sing through their noses," the "doleful, sentimental bawl" imitated by Kingsley in "The Last Buccaneer." In her words it is "a queer old quaver, shaky, shrill and sad, with queer little curly cues, twiddles and quavers," sung to the accompaniment of "a creaky old leaky concertina underneath the great gold moon." But this pathos wages a losing fight not only against her prevailing humour, the humour of "The Ballad of the Ressurection Packet of the Salt 'Orse Line," for instance, but against her high spirits, which insist on embarking on a good swinging rhythm.

Such musical verse, such singable ballads which retain their quality even when chanting of the

"Rampin', raw-boned, cast-steel-jawboned
Any transport smile,"

ought to proceed from a musician or the daughter of a musician. But she can put forward no such claim. Nor does she owe to heredity her great feeling for the music of the sea. You would imagine her father an old sea captain. But he was a solicitor. How then did the love of the sea come to her, living on those Lancashire wolds? "By intuition," she says. It is a riddle. Perhaps the explanation may be found in the way of her life on those wolds. She lived an open-air life, following on foot the Holcombe Harriers, whose huntsman, John Jackson, she celebrates in "For'ard on!" And roaming over the hillsides she got wide views of cloudland and plain down to the distant sea. Remember that Coleridge was similarly soaking himself in moorland air when he wrote the greatest of all sea poems.

Here on these Lancashire hills must have begun that love of the sea which was confirmed when she came south and haunted the London Docks, and steeped herself in sea-lore. She learned the heart of the sailor, his golden visions of lazying at home or in South Seas lotus lands, and his deep-seated mistrust of these visions.

"I'd want the hard-case mates a-bawlin', an' the strikin' o' the bell;
I've cursed it oft and cruel -- but I miss it all like hell."

"Ain't it queer," another of her sailors says, "how a feller never knows what he likes best till it goes?" Happier the Tommy of the "Grand Tour," undistracted by any sea longings, who has seen just as much as he wanted. "I've seen the Perramids and Spink, which I 'ad oft desired."

We suspect that Miss Fox-Smith has no longing for South Sea beaches or "Spinks," but is content with her own world, limited but inexhaustible, of docks and seamen and coasting vessels. Her senses are almost unconsciously on the alert to catch every little point of interest:

"The patter of reef-points on tops'ls a-shiver;
The song of the jibs when they tauten and quiver."

come as natural, unsought music to the ears of this true poet of the sea.

W. A. F.

Notes:

From The Bookman, "Cicely Fox Smith," by W. A. F., published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, UK, Volume 64, September, 1923, pp. 273-274 (via Colby College, Waterville, Maine, digital archives)

So far I've been unable to find out who "W.A.F." was and I'm still after a hardcopy version of the article because it has the best glossy photo of C. Fox Smith that we've seen; the copy that I photographed at the National Maritime Museum was folded twice across the image and even after editing in Photoshop it doesn't look as good as it should.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble