IAN HUME TOWNSEND MACKENZIE

POET OF DESIRE

 

Notations on the Life and Death of the Poet

IAN HUME TOWNSEND MACKENZIE

(1898-1918)

BY

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

‘To him indeed the soul was in perpetual issue with the body, and it was the soul whose claim he would serve first and always.’ [‘Forgotten Places’. 1919. Introduction by Arthur Waugh. p. 9]

 

 

 

Ian Hume Townsend Mackenzie was born on 28^th September 1898 and he was christened on 27^th October 1898 at St Peter’s, Southborough, Kent. Ian was a remarkable young poet whose life was sadly cut short and I felt the necessity to research and collate some information about this little known sensitive poet whose life-force burned bright and short with examples from his poetry. From his early works Ian Mackenzie appears to be a confident poet who did not resort to the flowery ‘decadence’ of the nineties poets and those who flourished beyond into the next century, he stands at the edge of modernity looking towards the new poetry that is already rising with sincere and strong poetic expression. He was a man who loved music, poetry, nature and cricket and he strode through life with a radiant presence and integrity.

 

DESIRE

 

This is my desire
Which burns the fuel of my soul.
O terrible white fire!
Leaping to blister the sky.
Beyond my sight;
Ever reaching higher;
My strength and my delight;
Oh out of my control!
This is my desire: -

To hear the song that beauty sings,

To refashion the earth with the joy of things,
To grasp in a corner of my mind
The sunlit clouds, the driving wind.
To let imagination fly
Up the beauty of the sky.
To hold it with me when I go
To sing my song on earth below.

This is the desire

Which burns the fuel of my soul.
O terrible white fire!
Leaping to blister the sky.
Beyond my sight;
Ever reaching higher;
My strength and my delight;
Oh out of my control!
This is my desire.

 

AND SO MAN LIVES

And so man lives

Between those shadowy gates
Where darkness covers up his memory,
And thought with thought forever separates
The disconnected things that he can see.
Those two strange steeps:
One whence he wakes,
And how he cannot tell;
One in which he falls
And knows not how he fell,
Where life with memory breaks.

.           .           .           .           .           .

Memory like water

Surging round our ears
Brings its echoes, softer
Than the sound of laughter –
Laughter of some strange forgotten years.

.           .           .           .           .           .

Someone gazing in a stream sees reflections hurry by;
Someone underneath a tree searching all its greenery;
Someone looking at a face holds a flying memory.

.           .           .           .           .           .

Broken images that pass

Through a twisted looking-glass;
Things we do and things we say
Ever fluttering away.

.           .           .           .           .           .

Disconnected things we see

In the brightness of the day:

Just a flower growing there

In the happiness of air.

Tiny little birds, that sing

In the melody of spring.

.           .           .           .           .           .

What we are and what we see

Are only shreds of memory.
Broken shreds and fragments pass
Through a twisted looking-glass.

[Two poems by Ian Mackenzie found in ‘More Songs by the Fighting Men’ Soldier Poets: Second Series. London. Erskine Macdonald. 1917. p. 95-98]

 

Ian’s father was Boyce John Mackenzie (son of John Mackenzie and Janet Scobie) who was born in 1843 in Durness, Scotland. Boyce was the first born son to Captain Boyce Mackenzie (born 1792 in Edderachillis, Sutherland; dying 27^th July 1877, Creich) of Creich House, Creich, and Jane Scobie (born 15^th June 1804 in Tongue, Sutherland; dying 15^th February 1885, Creich) who were married on 14^th October 1840 in Durness, Scotland. The next child born to the Mackenzie’s was Mackay Donald Mackenzie, born 7^th August 1846, Kincardine, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, who died on 6^th September 1934, Bexhill on Sea, (1) and a third child named John Mackenzie, born 14^th June 1848, Kincardine, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland.

In the 1871 census Boyce is living in lodgings in Lewisham, London, aged 27 and unmarried and he is a ‘Merchant’s Clerk’.

Boyce’s first marriage occurred in the winter of 1877 in Dorking, Surrey, to Henrietta Wolcot Moore, born in 1840, Cambridge. In the 1881 census Boyce and Henrietta are visitors at the home of Henry Robinson, (aged 79, born in London) in Effingham, Surrey, (Dorking); Boyce is 38 with ‘no profession’ and Henrietta is 40. Henrietta Wolcot Mackenzie died in the summer of 1887 aged 47 in Tunbridge Wells.
In the next census of 1891 Boyce John Mackenzie is living in Culverden Park Road, Tonbridge; he is 47 years old, a ‘widower, living on own means’ with two servants: Ann Shoebridge, a Cook, Domestic Servant, aged 49, married and born in East Grinstead, Sussex in 1842; and Kate Shoebridge, a single, 21 year old Housemaid, born in Kent in 1870.

Boyce re-married on 15^th April 1891 to his second and younger wife Susanna Isabella Townsend Gahan, (daughter of Frederick Beresford Gahan and Katherine Jane Townsend) (1) born in County Donegal, Ireland on 28^th September 1866. We find them on the 1901 census taken on 31^st March, living in Park Road, in the parish of St Thomas, Tunbridge Wells, Southborough, Kent. Boyce is 57 years old ‘living on own means’ and Susanna Townsend Mackenzie is 35 years old. Their first-born child is Donald Mackay Scobie Mackenzie, aged 8, born in Tunbridge in 1892 (he died in 1960 aged 67 in Birmingham). Their second child is Frederick Boyce Mackenzie, aged 7, also born in Tunbridge in 1893. The third child is Kenneth S Mackenzie, aged 5, born in Ireland in 1896 and Ian Hume Townsend Mackenzie, aged 2. It seems from this that the Mackenzie’s were in Ireland sometime between Frederick’s birth in 1893 and Ian’s birth in 1898, probably in Donegal, Susanna’s place of birth. Also at the address in Park Road is a visitor named Kathleen Townsend, aged 28, born in Ireland in 1873. The Mackenzie’s have three servants: Gessie Welch, Nurse, Domestic Servant, aged 39, born in London in 1862; Esther Tolhurst, Cook, Domestic Servant, aged 31, born in Lambhurst, Kent in 1870 and Sarah Baldwin, aged 20, a Parlour Maid, Domestic Servant born in London in 1881.

A decade later in the 1911 census Boyce, aged 67 living on ‘private means’ and Susanna, aged 45 are living with their eight year old daughter Eileen Katherine A Mackenzie, born in Southborough, Kent on 23^rd January 1903 (possibly dying in February 1988 in Chichester, Sussex) and they still have two of their domestic servants: Gessie and Esther. Ian is away from home as a 12 year old boarder at School in Tunbridge Wells. He was educated at St Lawrence College, Ramsgate in Kent and he was very keen on cricket playing for the school XI, in 1913. Ian attended the Royal Military College in Sandhurst during the winter of 1916-17 and became friends with the writer Alec Waugh (1898-1981) brother of the more famous Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). Ian had written a review of Alec’s ‘Resentment Poems’ which appeared in ‘New Witness’, (20^th September 1918) edited by G K Chesterton. In a letter written by Ian to Alec from Malleny Camp, Currie, Midlothian, dated 26^th July 1917, Ian writes to confirm the arrival of Alec’s book ‘The Loom of Youth’ which the author sent to Alec, and Ian writes appreciatively – ‘It is not for its great literary merit that I shall value this particular copy, nor for any money it may have cost you to buy or send it: but because I regard it as a seal of friendship from my dearest friend in all the world, it is, that I thank you from the very depths of my soul. Yours ever, Ian’.
In fact, Alec’s father Arthur Waugh wrote a breathtakingly beautiful and tender tribute to Ian Mackenzie in the poet’s posthumously published volume of poetry in 1919, ‘Forgotten Places’ (Chapman & Hall.) Arthur sketches a portrait of the young poet, a man who ‘had all the outward evidences of the poet’s heart, and all its inward spirituality. Born of a family of tall and handsome men, with a wealth of locks, and beautiful, sensitive features, he possessed many of the physical attributes of a young pagan divinity.’ (‘Forgotten Places’. Introduction. p. 8) Mackenzie’s poetic inspiration comes from Shelley and Swinburne, with a tender devotion to Tennyson and Bridges, he was, as Arthur claims, a man with ‘the heart of the hunter of the soul, perpetually seeking rest and finding none. Those who knew him best knew the secret of that spiritual solitude, and it is just that shy solitude which finds the fullest expression in his poetry. But it was only one side of his nature, and not perhaps the most characteristic. For he was a gay and gallant lover of everything that is lovely; and it is that passionate love of loveliness, with the corresponding hatred of things ugly and malign, which leaves his memory as a poignant and imperishable possession to all those who were fortunate enough to call him friend.’ (p. 8) He ‘loved cricket only less than he loved poetry.’ (p. 9) Poetry was often the topic of conversation in the evenings at Sandhurst, ‘when the day’s military work was done’ and he could ‘forget the red-books for an hour or two in the dreams of “Hyperion” and “Adonais”.’ (p. 9) Ian’s love of poetry was vibrant for it was the ‘background of all these dreams, and the great poetry of the past the staple of all conversation.’ (p. 10) Arthur, who often entertained the young poet at his home in Hampstead with his son Alec, found Ian to be ‘the very spirit of irresponsible joy’ and ‘there was nothing the least morbid about him, no sort of shrinking from the pleasures of life, no shadow of self-absorption, about his daily relationship with his friends.’  (p. 11) Ian had a great love of the theatre and a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan – most mornings he could be heard singing such works by ‘Handel, from Sullivan, from Mendelssohn, from Gounod and from Lionel Monckton, all melting into one another in one wild “musical confusion.”’ (p. 11); a beautiful youth with ‘the tenderness of a child and the strength of a man.’ (p. 12)
‘We were expecting him one week-end in the autumn of 1918; but, as so often; he had left the engagement at loose ends, and we wrote for confirmation. A reply came from his father to say that Ian had been taken ill with pneumonia. It had all happened in an instant, - and at the moment when we were expecting to see him swing through our little garden-gate, he was struggling for his life far away in a strange ward. There followed days of grave anxiety, relieved by news that he was holding his own bravely.’ (p. 12-13)

‘Forgotten Places’ is quite an exceptional volume of poetry and Ian Mackenzie writes in a modern metaphysical style which looks at the imprint the material body makes; the shape one makes and leaves in life – ‘the flesh will loosen every day / from that skeleton thing / that once was me.’ (I) One of the themes through the poems is of something hidden or obscured as in a doorway or barrier through which he is unable to pass beyond the threshold, and in the poem ‘The Darkened Ways’ the poet sense the nearness of Death and stares through the keyhole of the door that divides him from the spectre, ‘kneeling on the floor, / searching for something in the dark, behind.’ Later in the same poem the barrier appears to be ‘a dim unending wall of glass / through which I could not pass. /yet I could see the days behind, / standing there without a sound.’ And there is the childish sense at the culmination of death’s acceptance – ‘One day I wandered in a wood / And found my body lying on the ground.’

 

THE DARKENED WAYS

Death, I smote the shadowy door

That lies between you and my mind,
Stared through the keyhole, kneeling on the floor,
Searching for something in the dark, behind.
And sometimes, as the silence closed around,
I heard the door-bolt loosened from within;
I stood there, but there was no sound,
And I could not enter in.

There was a moment once,

There must have been –
Could I but catch it in my brain –
Passing that doorway,
I must have come between
What I cannot see and what is seen!
Silence splinters,
Everywhere shreds of memories flutter through…
You forget, remember, and find;
And twist the puzzle in your mind:
But most of the fragments are not there,
And your eyes are the more completely blind.

Walking from that unknown sleep,

Suddenly I was dismayed.
I felt its memories round me creep,
Making me afraid.
Then something held my frightened glance;
I was swept into a dance,
Whirled and swept – an endless white,
Blinding all my startled sight,
Then, breaking through the doors of death,
All the thoughts of my delight
Flamed into my countenance;
And I felt my gasping breath,
As I gazed into my eyes,
Till I knew my frightened glance,
As it grew amid the dance.

.           .           .           .

Bewildered, suddenly I turned round,

To see a dim unending wall of glass
Through which I could not pass.
Yet I could see the days behind,
Standing there without a sound.
Flesh, I am weary of your company.
I feel your ugliness every day.
Shuffling, hustling you are me
And I cannot get away.
There must be some doorway,
That we cannot find,
Between the body and the mind.

When stillness covered all the land,

I could never understand
Why I did not make a sound,
Until one day I wandered in a wood
And found my body lying on the ground.

We all have philosophies,

Cover them with cap and bell,
Deck them out in fineries,
Till they are mythologies.

Then there is a pause:

No man can tell
What lies upon the ground,
The other side of sound.

There is a God! but he is the air,

And the trees and the fields.
He lives in laughter and shining hair,
In the night, in the sunset,
In the pale green of twilight,
In lights and shadows and windy flowers,
In flying dust and in laughing showers,
He lives where the rabbit scampers and delves.
He lives in us. He is ourselves.
He lives in the wind and the flying sky,
And he is Memory when we die.

[Forgotten Places. Chapman & Hall. 1919. p. 20-24]

 

The poet utilises the imagery of the bolting and unbolting of doors to signify perhaps the impression of the mind over the body; the senses and the flesh – in the poem ‘Dust’ there is a desperate longing to equate the inevitable end of the material body with the history and story of life contained within the dust we shall become –‘a pebble glittering in the sun / whispers a tale, but you will not hear; / it is so tiny and so still, / of love that was known, / and anger and fear / one time, near some forgotten hill.’ And the ultimate conclusion remains: ‘Dust cleaves to dust, / And life desires life.’

 

DUST

Yesterday upon a hill

I stood looking down below,
Watching crowds that come and go,
Each with some purpose to fulfil.
People meeting now and then,
Chattering to friends they know,
Hurrying away again to some work that they must do.
Dust is flying everywhere:
Uncertain fragments flutter about.
Knowledge shuffles here and there,
Trying to find the mystery out….

A fallen tree lies on the ground, shattered and old.

It is crumbling away, and the earth will fold
Her darkness over it very slow,
Till she draws it into her heart below.
A bolt has dropped from a rotted gate,
Eaten and seared with rust;
It will be for a long time there in the moss,
Breaking away into dust.
Winter: the trees and the fields are white,
Covered with flakes of snow.
A bird that sang in the spring last year
Falls dead on the grass below.
Anxiously watching beside the bed
A mother feels each minute creep.
Her child, who has coughed the whole night through,
Suddenly falls asleep.

A dead man lies on the burning sand:

Vultures tear his flesh:
His bones
Will soon fall apart and lie
Scattered among the stones.

A pebble glittering in the sun

Whispers a tale, but you will not hear;
It is so tiny and so still,
Of love that was known,
And anger and fear
One time, near some forgotten hill.

A baby wakes and suddenly sings…

Oh, how shall we understand!
Of strange forgotten happenings
In another land.

People are rushing about in the square,

Thinking of this, thinking of that,
A man on the pavement over there
Catches a sudden dream
Of trees overhanging a sunlit stream.

In the body of one man there must

Be many million flakes of dust,
Bird and flower, sky and tree:
Oh, if each separate grain could hold
A separate memory!

Dust creeps to us: we touch it everywhere:

We live with birds and trees and flowers, and there
Is always some familiar thing reminding us
That we are still the same;
Some colour, some sound or shape we know,
That seems to flow between,
And call to us:
A terrible arch dread,
Welding together life with life,
And the living with the dead.

It holds us in the faces of the flowers;

A petal bitten terribly with gold,
A flaming poppy seems to hold
Some deep unfathomable fear
That calls, that beckons us to come
Beware! Beware!
Lest a flower root you down by the hair!
Dust cleaves to dust,
And life desires life.
There is some strangeness here.
A flake of dust will nourish in the flesh
Then suddenly appear, and live and move.
It holds the fear,
That strange fear in the hearts of men
You cannot put away again.
And it is old… oh, who can tell how old?
How peacefully it lies
In its green valleys,
Flowery woods and hills,
Or where it sleeps
Among huge tranquil plains
That reach towards the edges of the skies.

For on its sunlit march it comes,

Breaking in clouds of golden spray,
It heralds the day
With greens and golds:
It scatters colour, through it flows
The burning sunset like a rose.

[‘Forgotten Places’. p. 24-27]

 

In ‘The Secret World’ the poet dismantles his body, saying ‘take these eyes. I yet shall see: / let them blossom silently.’ And then turns to his ears – ‘take these ears, let them bring / flowers for the butterfly: / I still shall hear the wild bird sing….’ There is a real wealth of beauty in these wonderful verse and Mackenzie seems to speak to me directly, I find, like no other poet I have come across for some time, there is a personal affiliation which resonates within –

 

‘I remember the sliding lawn – the scent of heavy foliage,
The lilac, the tall trees at the end,
And the moonlight
Twisting itself into wisps,
And pushing through the leaves,
Like fine white feathers of grass.’ (Eyes. III)

In the poem ‘Self’ the poet climbs ‘Time’s futile stair’ and dreads the emptiness of the last step:

 

SELF

I

Don’t look round! No need yet to look round:

There are hoarse voices muttering in my ear –
And clumsily I scale the useless ground,
With dread of words I am afraid to hear.

Knowing there’s nothing, nothing I can hold.

Nothing I’ve written or preserved, or spoken,
When all man’s love seems perishable gold,
And the one thing I trusted in is broken.

And so I go, climbing Time’s futile stair,

Shutting my aching eyes, lest I should learn;
Dreading the emptiness that will find me, where
On the last step I make, I too must turn.

II

Look at the shape you’ve made;

The uncertain limning knife.
And face it unafraid,
A mockery of life.

Do you bring this, elate
For praise of memory?
Fool! you only imitate
Other men’s tapestry.

Some day your farce will stop.

You’ll be no more, you alone:
And all you mean to do will drop –
O self, wake up, get something that’s your own.

[‘Forgotten Places’. p. 32-33]

In the poem ‘The Room’ written at Sandwich in 1918, Mackenzie recalls his time of thought in a room ‘closed by clean whitewashed walls’ by the light of day and later where ‘the dark shadows crept, / Leaving it slowly colourless, submissive to the night.’ His thoughts ‘stretch out beyond it and away, / Reaching to something memory cannot find’ –

‘O you who enter here, when I have gone,

You will not know the hidden lips that cry
To you “safety,” as the night comes down.
You will not understand the fear
In the grey waste of grass and sands
That lie
Past the shutters closed against the wind,
(Ceremoniously closed, by your vain, foreign hands)…
And you will take the security of those walls,
Not thinking of the compact strength in them.
And when moon unfolds between the curtains
And the shadows creep; there will be beauty, then, that calls.
You will not hear.’

[‘Forgotten Places’. The Room. IV. p. 37]

He found that the ‘ugliness of the material life distresses him, but it never overwhelms’ (Introduction. p. 14) and Waugh concludes his touching tribute, saying that ‘the laughter and the love of Ian Mackenzie were of eternal stuff. They were born of the sunlight, and return with it again. For they are “memory when we die.”’ (Introduction. p. 15)

 

MEMORIES

The scented winds blow down the night,

And darkness creeps to me;
Suddenly the stars shed light
On some unremembered sea.

Sometimes I can grasp again

Something I have known;
A thought of love, a stab of pain
Float like shadows through the brain,
And quickly they are gone.

So I can remember

Lives I must have lived before:
A sudden gleam of golden hair,
Kissed passionately I know not where;
For memory shuts his shadowy door.

[‘Forgotten Places’. p. 59]

 

While he was a cadet at Sandhurst he had a severe illness and was left with slight heart trouble and not passed for service abroad and he became a 2^nd Lieutenant in the 3^rd Battalion, Highland Light Infantry and spent the war years in Scotland at the Regimental Malleny Camp, Currie, Midlothian, Scotland. Ian Mackenzie contracted pneumonia (Spanish Flu) and was sent to hospital in Cambridge; he was told that the war was over on Armistice Day, 11^th November and during the night ‘his brave heart fought its last fight, and failed him…’ (p. 13) he died later on Tuesday 12^th November 1918, aged 20 years old. His parents Boyce and Susannah were living at 30 Court Road, Tunbridge Wells at the time of Ian’s death and Ian is buried in Cambridge City Cemetery, c.3391.

 

THE HOUR

Oh, one glad hour, flung from the trembling skies –

Life of our lives – yet, it cannot remain;
But as some gorgeous flower must fall and wane,
Thus in one night all men’s love breaks and dies,
And the dead years still echo with their cries.
Time cannot render back its joys again.
Our tears and griefs were borne, that out of pain
We might feel love like this burn in our eyes.

We have known all. Strong let us go as one,

E’er yet the glory round our souls has fled.
Darkness, while yet the brightness of desire
Is splendid as a coronal of fire,
To light the sullen faces of the dead.
Proud let us go, down the dark road alone.

[‘Forgotten Places’. p. 54]

Ian’s brother Frederick Boyce Mackenzie died just a few short months before Ian – Frederick Boyce Mackenzie was born on 3^rd May 1893 and he also attended St Lawrence College, Ramsgate; he was School Captain in the cricket team 1910-11 and cricket XI 1909-10-11. He became a Captain in the 71^st Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery and served almost three years at the Front, mostly the Ypres Salient. He married Mildred Snell (born 2^nd December 1895, Kenley, Surrey; dying 25^th August 1984, Mill Valley, California) on 6^th February 1917 in Stonegate, Sussex and in 1918 Frederick was sent back to England and based in Winchester. In early July of that year he visited the New Forest and met some friends for lunch and because it was such a lovely day Frederick decided to spend the night in the Forest. He met a local farmer in the Forest and they got talking and the farmer offered Frederick his hay loft to sleep in. Early the next morning the farmer was awoken by cries of ‘Fire!’ as the hay loft was ablaze. A pony was rescued from the barn but Captain Frederick Mackenzie burnt to death on 4^th July 1918. He was twenty-five years old. The verdict was ‘accidental death’ and there is a memorial in Fordingbridge Cemetery, Hampshire. There were no children from the marriage and Mildred re-married in Paris on 16^th June the following year, to an American named Whitney Braymer Wright.

Ian’s father, Boyce John Mackenzie died on 15^th June 1921 in Tunbridge Wells, aged 77 and his mother, Susanna Isabella Townsend Mackenzie died on 14^th March 1949 aged 83 in Fulmer Grange, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire.

 

TO I. H. T. M.

Like fire I saw thee

Smiling, running, leaping, glancing and consuming;
Like fire thine ardent body moving;
Scorching and scouring the mind’s waste places
Like fire: like fire extinguished.

Now in my hands

Holding thy book, these ashes of thee;
Still fire I know thee
Gloriously somewhere burning,
Who wast so keen, more keenly;
Who wast so pure, more purely;
Beyond my vision,
Somewhere before God’s face,
Eternal.

[Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff. (3) October, 1919, from his dedication in ‘The Song of Roland’. 1919. The author also dedicated the volume to two other literary friends who died in the war during 1918: Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge who was killed in September (4), the poet Wilfred Owen who was killed on the 4^th November, a week before the Armistice and Ian of course a short time after in November]

 

 

NOTES:

1. Ian’s Uncle Mackay Donald Scobie Mackenzie, born 1849 is recorded in the 1901 census as living in Bristol, Gloucestershire, a 54 year old Bank Manager with his wife Florence M Mackenzie, aged 40 from South Shields, Durham, and their three children: Marjorie Scobie Mackenzie, aged 13, born in 1888 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northumberland; Boyce Mackay Scobie Mackenzie, aged 12, born in 1889 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northumberland and Barbara Scobie Mackenzie, aged 3, born in 1898 in Clifton, Gloucestershire. Mackay Donald Scobie Mackenzie married Florence Margaret Stevenson (born 1861 in South Shields, Durham) in 1886 in Lanchester, Durham. In the 1911 census Mackay Donald Scobie Mackenzie is a 64 year old widower and retired Bank Manager living in Bexhill, Sussex. His son Boyce is a 22 year old Undergraduate.

2. Frederick Beresford Gahan (1821-6^th July 1904) of the 57^th Regiment [son of Major Beresford Gahan, 5^th Dragoon Guards and second wife Henrietta Ann Townsend] and Katherine Jane Townsend (born 20^th December 1834 in India, dying in 1920) were married on 31^st October 1860 at Kilgariff, County Cork; Frederick Beresford Gahan was a surveyor and they had the following children: a) Frederick Beresford Townsend Gahan, born 1861, died1862. b) Edward Hume Townsend Gahan, born 1864, died 1875. c) Susana Isabella Townsend Gahan, born 28^th September 1866 in Donegal, died 14^th March1949. d) Frederick George Townsend Gahan, born 7^th December 1866, died 31^st August 1955 – Frederick worked as a civil engineer for the Congested Districts Board; the Land Commission and the Electricity Supply Board. He married Winifred Mary Waters and had three sons and two daughters all born in County Donegal except for Frederick Dermot Gahan. e) Beresford Horatio Townsend Gahan, born 9^th April 1868 in Donegal, he took Holy Orders, married and had two children. f) Horace Stirling Gahan, born 3^rd December 1870, died 3^rd February 1958, aged 88, he also took Holy Orders and became Chaplain of Christ Church in Brussels from 1914-22 [he visited Edith Cavell in the prison of St Giles on 11^th October 1915 and later administered the Last Rites to her on the day before she was shot by firing squad]. Horace married and had two children: John and Susan. g) Reginald Hume Townsend Gahan, born 27^th July 1879, Reginald was a Land Agent who married and emigrated to Canada. He had no children. h) Walter Henry Townsend Gahan, born 3^rd January 1881, died 5^th June 1963. Walter was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and he took Holy Orders; he married Florence Rose (died 6^th March 1963) and had no children.

3. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (25^th September 1889-28^th February 1930). A Scottish writer mostly known for his translation of Proust. He was educated at Winchester College and became a friend of Christopher Sclater Millard (1872-1927) the enthusiast and bibliographer of Oscar Wilde. Scott Moncrieff attained a Law Degree and an English Literature Degree from Edinburgh University and it was during this time that he met and befriended the undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge. Scott Moncrieff attained a commission in August 1914 to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, 2^nd Battalion and served at the Western Front from 1914-17. In January 1918 Scott Moncrieff attended the wedding of the poet Robert Graves and met the war poet Wilfred Owen with whom he fell in love.

4. Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge, born 19th September 1890 in Edinburgh, the son of the Reverend Philip Thomas Bainbrigge (1848-1919) and Helen Jane Bainbrigge nee Gillespie (1866-1904). Philip attended Rottingdean Prep School in 1902 and won a King's Scholarship to Eton College in 1903 where he excelled in Greek and Latin. He won a Scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1909 but decided to enter Trinity College, Cambridge on 1st October of that year where he studied Classics and won a First in that subject. He won the Bell Scholarship Award in 1910 and attained his BA in 1912 and MA in 1916. In 1913 he became a Classics Master at Shrewsbury School before enlisting in the Army in 1917 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 5th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, attached to the Welsh Regiment. He was killed in action on 18th September 1918 at the Battle of Epehy the day before his 28th birthday. He is buried in Five Points Cemetery, Lechelle, France. Grave B.24. He is best known in the literary world as the author of a privately printed verse play titled 'Achilles in Scyros: A Classical Comedy' (1927). For more information on Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge see Jennifer Ingleheart's excellent 'Masculine Plural.' Oxford University Press. 2018.