Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, John Masefield attributed his love of books and poetry to his time in New Ferry as a young man. At the age of 13, he was sent to a naval training ship moored off New Ferry Pier. The future poet spent several years aboard HMS Conway, listening to tales about the sea and so felt compelled to become a writer and storyteller himself, with his poems about the sea being well known. Sea Fever famously opens with the lines ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky; And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by’.