An episode of Rick Stein’s Cornwall recently repeated on BBC2 features the Cornish poet Charles Causley, who spent his life in the Cornish border town of Launceston. Stein talks to the Cornish writer Patrick Gale, who has written about Causley’s life, including his service with the Navy during the second world war.

After the war Causley returned to the cottage he shared with his mother, and became a primary school teacher. Poems featured in the programme include the war poem ‘Rattler Morgan’, ‘Timothy Winters’, a children’s poem ‘The Zig Zag Path’, and probably his most famous poem, ‘Eden Rock’.

Charles Causley was born in 1917, and died in 2003, aged 86. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967. 

Watch it on BBC iPlayer (the item on Charles Causley is 18 minutes into the programme) 

PHOTOGRAPH: BBC