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Sylvia Plath Who's Who: Hamish Stewart

The modern age supplies, at our fingertips, a wealth of information. Some of it is good. Some of it bad. Some of it is really bad. 

Over the last year or two this blog has featured images of some of the people Sylvia Plath knew from her Smith College teachers to boys she dated at Amherst, Yale, and Princeton. I do hope this is good---if not really good---information to have.

One particular person I have always been interested in because there is so little know about him is Hamish Stewart, the guy who accompanied Plath to the St. Botolph's Review party where she met, and bit, Ted Hughes, on the night of 25 February 1956. During the daytime, Plath met with Dr. Davy for a long time at his office at the University Health Centre, she read in Racine, and had dinner with Jane, Winthrop Means, and Nat Lamar.

The gloss on Stewart in the Journals and the Letters is basically basic: 

"David Hamish Stewart (1933– ), Canadian; B.A. 1956, English, Queens’ College, Cambridge; dated SP in 1956."


Well, it is possible that the Hamish Stewart that Sylvia Plath knew passed away in 2005. 

That year, a 72-year-old man went missing according to this article on the BBC's website in May: "Concern growing over missing man." The article includes an image (right). 

In August, a follow-up article ran, "Body found in field", in the Somerset County Gazette, confirming the identity of the missing man as being David Hamish Stewart.

The BBC article hyphenates the surname to Hamish-Stewart, but the Somerset County Gazette does not. 

Around the time that Plath's Journals were published in 2000, the Toronto Globe and Mail's Michael Posner wrote an article "Who was Plath's Canadian boyfriend?" In it, Posner details that Stewart was a 1954 graduation of Bishop's University in Lennoxville, outside of Sherbrooke, Quebec. But there are many more questions left unanswered in his piece. 

I wrote to the archivist at Bishop's University, Anna M. Davis, and she was kind enough to send me a senior-year image of Hamish Stewart. I am no forensic scientist but judging from the shape of the eye/eye-lids, nose, and lower lip, it appears to me to align.

Here they are side-by-side:


In addition to the Letters and Journals, Hamish features in Plath's short story "Stone Boy With Dolphin." If the details in these sources is accurate, he slept with Plath that famous Saturday night after the St. Botolph's Review launch party at Falcon Yard.

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All links accessed 7 February 2022.

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