Alfred Williams (poet), Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetAlfred Williams (poet)
English poet, author and collector of folk songs
Date of Birth: 
About Alfred Williams (poet)
- Alfred Owen Williams (February 7, 1877 – April 10, 1930) was a poet, author and a collector of folk song lyrics who was born and lived most of his life at South Marston, near Swindon, UK.
- He was almost entirely self-taught, producing his most famous work, Life in a Railway Factory (1915), in his spare time after completing a gruelling day's work in the Great Western Railway works in Swindon.
- He was nicknamed “The Hammerman Poet”. Williams was born in Cambria Cottage in the village of South Marston, the son of a carpenter, and grew up in poverty after his father abandoned his wife and eight children.
- He became a farm labourer at eleven, and then, when he was fourteen, he entered Swindon Railway Works, where he worked as a steamhammer operator for the next twenty-three years.Married in 1903, he pursued a demanding schedule of full-time work and private study.
- He published his first of book of poems, Songs in Wiltshire, in 1909, but his health declined and he left the factory in 1914. Williams published six volumes of poetry and a series of prose books about his home villages and others nearby, but died in poverty in 1930 in South Marston.
- Life in a Railway Factory has been described as “undisputed as the most important literary work ever produced in Swindon, about Swindon.”
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