William Henry Davies became a writer literally by accident. Living the life of a penniless ‘hobo’ in Canada, he lost a leg while attempting to jump a moving train. Prevented from doing physical work he turned to poetry, sending some of his efforts to George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw was amazed to discover the author of these impressive verses - “like a draught of clear water in a desert”- was not a literary scholar but the resident of a south London doss house.

Born at Newport, then in Monmouthshire, Davies saw little appeal in life as an apprentice picture framer. He took to a nomadic existence, living hand-to-mouth in England and later North America. These experiences formed the basis of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, which first appeared in 1908.

Published a quarter of a century before Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and fifty years ahead of Kerouac’s On the Road, Davies’s account of his impoverished but carefree life was a sensation.

Among his poems, Leisure is still regarded as a classic, containing the frequently quoted lines:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

The lines are inscribed beneath the statue by which he is now remembered in Newport city centre.

While success as a writer transformed Davies’s social standing, he quickly tired of being lionized by literary London. He left for the tranquillity of rural life, firstly in Sussex and later in Gloucestershire.

Never one for the niceties of polite Edwardian society, he married a former prostitute who was thirty years his junior. His account of their life together was not published until 1980.

In keeping with the unconventional life he had led, he left his by now considerable estate to a man he had never met.