THE HAUNTED RUINS OF THE OLD DOWER HOUSE

 THE HAUNTED RUINS OF THE OLD DOWER HOUSE

FAWSLEY, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

THE BLUEBELLS OF BADBY WOOD

 THE BLUEBELLS OF BADBY WOOD

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

ERNLE JOHNSON

 ‘OUR FRIENDSHIP DARK’

ERNLE SACHEVERELL WILBERFORCE JOHNSON

BY

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

‘The ghost of him, only the ghost, abides

Sad by the table when the feast is done,

With yearning gleam of melting eye, and moan

Of sick desire through the pale myrtle glides.’ (1)

Most of what we know about the poet, Ernle Johnson, is due to his friendship with the politician and historian, Reginald Baliol Brett (1852-1930), the 2nd Viscount Esher, whose journals were published in four volumes (vols I-II 1934, vols III-IV 1938). Brett, is one of those charming figures who seem to stride through history, mingling with the great and the good, making valuable friendships and promoting them into offices of power. As a young boy at Eton (1865-70), he was taught by the great educator and poet, William Johnson [later Cory] (1823-92) of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge; Johnson, or ‘Tute’ as he became affectionately known, published his influential volume of poems, ‘Ionica’ in 1858 (Smith, Elder & Co.) and wrote the lyrics to the Eton Boating Song. He is also remembered for cultivating ‘romantic’ friendships at Eton (although probably not of the physical kind) they were deemed too intimate and he was famously dismissed from Eton in Easter 1872 by the Headmaster, the staunch traditionalist James Hornby, who also went on to dismiss the schoolmaster Oscar Browning (1837-1923), the ‘O.B.’ (another pupil of Johnson at Eton) for similar ‘romantic friendship’ offences and ‘unorthodox’ approaches to teaching in 1875. Reginald Brett and William Johnson were fond of each other, a friendship which remained throughout Johnson’s life (Brett published his biographical tribute to Johnson, ‘Ionicus’ in 1924). It is worth noting that prior to Reginald Brett’s infatuation with Ernle he formed a deep romantic attachment to his friend at Eton known as ‘Chat’ (short for ‘Chatterbox’); Chat, whose name is Charles David Robertson Williamson (1853-1943) became Roman Catholic in 1875 at the age of 21 and later entered the priesthood. Regy was very sad to leave Eton and especially sad to leave ‘Chat’ (who went up to Baliol College, Oxford with a testimonial from William Johnson), for whom he developed an overpowering devotion – Ernle, would help to fill that void!  
Ernle Sacheverell Wilberforce Johnson was born in Oxford on 19th December 1858, the second son of Reverend George Henry Sacheverell Johnson (1808-1881), who was the Dean of Wells from 1854-81 and Lucy O’Brien, youngest daughter of Rear Admiral Robert O’Brien (1776-1838) and Anne O’Brien (Robert O’Brien is the brother of Sir Edward O’Brien (1773-1837), 4th Baronet and M.P. for Dromoland, County Clare); George and Lucy were married on 20th April 1854 at the Abbey Church, Romsey, Hampshire. Ernle was baptised at Christ Church, Oxford on 13th January 1859. Ernle and elder brother George (2) lived with their parents at 64, High Street, Oxford. At the time of his younger brother, Arthur’s birth in 1861 (3), young Ernle and five year old George were staying nearby at number 18 High Street, the home of Elizabeth Dommney, a 33 year old single nurse from Wells. Ten years later, the three brothers, George 15, Ernle 12 and Arthur 9, are boarders at 10, Ellenborough Crescent, Weston Super Mare, the home and schoolhouse of 36 year old school Master, Sholto Middleton M.A., his wife Georgina and their children and other pupils (4). Two years later in January 1873, Ernle enters Malvern College as a House Scholar, (Class – Shell-VIth). He becomes Senior Chapel Prefect and President of the Debating Society (5).
It is during Ernle’s time as a pupil at Malvern that he meets Reginald Baliol Brett (2nd Viscount Esher) (1852-1930). The momentous occasion occurred while Brett and his father, William Baliol Brett (1815-1899) the 1st Viscount Esher, were on a four week tour of the West Country, during July to August 1874; having spent 4th August at Axminster, they travel to and stay at the Bishop’s Palace, Wells and it was here on Saturday 8th August that the encounter took place – ‘Ernle was brought by his younger brother Basil, a promising pianist, from the Deanery to the Palace. The two boys listened ravished by Regy’s rendering on the episcopal piano of Bach preludes and the Louis XIII gavotte.’ Ernle and Basil sang for Regy and he was reduced to tears by the beauty of Ernle’s voice, and so it was that ‘the susceptible postgraduate’s heart was smitten.’ (6) Reginald records in his journal for Saturday 8th August [1874]: ‘…I played some scraps including Bach’s “My heart ever faithful”. Basil played three of Mendelssohn’s “Lieder”, quite perfectly, and he and Ernle sang “O wert thou in the cauld blast” and my accompaniment was full of tears…’ (7). Ernle is described as having an ‘oval face, not strictly handsome; but he had fair, wavy hair and raised eyebrows which gave him a questioning aspect. He was small and rather delicate. Tormented, like so many sons of Victorian ecclesiastics, by problems of original sin and lack of response to prayer, he looked to Regy, as an older, experienced man of the world, for help and guidance. Yet he had a mind of his own. Strongly Tory and monarchist, he would not be converted to Whiggery by his friend.’ (8) The following day, Sunday 9th August, Brett and his father are at Longleat as a guest of Lord Bath; but Regy is simply devoted to Ernle and they fell into an almost daily correspondence and they meet at every opportunity during the holidays and even walk together in term-time at Malvern and Regy considers himself to be an influential teacher of social graces, ideas upon the nature of art and an instructor of virtues. In his journal for 16th February 1875, he writes – ‘I try to make him [Ernle] a patriot: and to bring him up, young as he is, with a fixed love of England and of freedom.’ And again, in another entry dated 6th March [1875] he says that ‘He [Ernle] has learned, young as he is, to love Italy, to glory in her liberties, and to hope for Greece. Is there another boy in England aged 16 who cares for those two things.’ (9) Ernle looked towards Regy as some sort of saviour, disclosing his problems and fears that he was not liked by his fellow school pupils due mostly to his strong Tory convictions and concerned that his ill health, he believed may be hereditary. Regy recognises Ernle’s poetic soul and nurtures it –  ‘Ernle’s fair hair haunts me, and his voice modulated as it is almost into a theme… I could write a symphony upon the melody of Ernle’s expression, poor dear little fellow.’ (10) A year later the secrecy of the older man’s romance is on his mind as he writes in his journal – ‘I pray Ernle to keep our friendship dark from the world which contaminates and destroys. Let us live in the world as though we were not of the world, and so shall we keep our lives fresh and unwithered.’ (17th November 1875) By New Year’s Eve he confesses to his journal that the final memories of the year 1875 are kept for his dear Ernle, writing ‘it is essentially his year’. (31st December 1875) Ernle shows a deep interest in poetry and Reginald encourages this, providing a gentle and guiding hand through the delights of verse and verse-making; in his journal for 26th January 1876, Reginald writes an interesting entry: ‘I tell Ernle that the Excursion ought to help him to see the weaknesses of these professional doctors of souls who think that they have science and philosophy on their side. It is a poem by which a man can regulate his mind; so much of it fits in with every line of belief or disbelief…’ He goes on to say that ‘Wordsworth taught me this: that a man can soften his heart by steady contemplation of beautiful things in Nature, and that beautiful things in Science, which are more accessible to many, will do as well.’ In the same entry he says that ‘If there is a Platonic element I love in him [Wordsworth], there is a Wordsworthian element I worship in Keats and Tennyson. Wordsworth instinctively got hold of the high Hellenic idea that the purest source of beauty lies in the common path of every day life.’ (11)
Brett writes in his journal at Carlisle on Thursday 2nd March 1876 – ‘I tell Ernle how glad I am he likes Wordsworth, though many people think it unhealthy in a boy like him, who ought to be revelling in Byron and Scott.’ (12) During this spring of 1876 Reginald visited Grassmere and ‘walked down to the village church, and saw Wordsworth’s simple grave’, all the time thinking of his young friend: ‘I have plucked some of the yew tree that overhangs it for Ernle…’ (13)
While at Malvern, Brett introduces Ernle to his friend Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920), the novelist, and like Brett, Sturgis is one of Johnson’s Eton favourites. We are informed by James Lees-Milne in his fascinating book, ‘The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher’ (1986) that young Ernle’s affections had drifted from Brett towards ‘a schoolfellow of his own age who was, however, to prove a disappointment.’ (p. 36) He goes on to say that ‘by the end of the summer term, the unrequited passion was over – and the schoolfellow had left the school.’ (p. 39)
After the midsummer term of 1877, Ernle read his ‘Prologue’ and winning Prize Poem ‘Constantinople (A Conquest of Greece by Rome)’ at the Malvern School Speech Day:

‘And O thy fair curls, king Apollo; and ah! that
Sped shaft from thy hand, -
Ye are fled, ye are perished, bright choir of them
That defended the land!’

The poem ‘was among the best, if not the very best, of such school performances, and showed a degree of facility rarely found in prize poems, much less in those which are the forced product of a schoolboy’s brain.’ (14) It is a particularly lyrical poem which shows great promise containing many ‘sweet and rhythmical lines’ where ‘mourners move slow in the twilight that rests / on a land of the dead.’ (15) There are some fine moments, as when the body of Constantine is borne through the city –
‘But from far a gathering murmur strikes upon the wandering ear;
List! the march of many legions; lo! the people’s pride is near!
Bear him to his lofty palace, there the monarch’s eye may view
All the city’s girth of beauty girdled by the shimmering blue;
Hark! they raise the chants before him as his chariot rolls along,
And the city’s lovely places ring with echoes caught from song. –

The sun casts his glory,
The temples their shade,
On the glittering pride
Of the long cavalcade;
Arabia’s swift horses
Are drawing his car,
And slaves left behind it
Rich spoils from the war.
The fishers of Thera
Sought pearls in their caves,
Where the height of Eleusis
Looks o’er the blue waves
And goldsmiths have wreathed them,
With gems from the mine,
To deck the tiara
Of great Constantine.
Raise higher your voices,
Your music raise higher,
O hymn the rich folds
Of the purple from Tyre,
Marpessa’s clear marble,
The swarm of white sails
Borne up from Perinthus
What time the day fails,
The white maiden city,
The hills of our home,
The daughter of Ocean,
The heiress of Rome,
The walls bathed in sunlight,
The towers that shine,
The temples made lovely
For great Constantine!’  

Ernle left Malvern in 1877 and went up to Christ Church, Oxford on a Classical Studentship on 12th October [1877] (B.A. 1881. Third Class Lit. Hum.) (16) He had rooms in Peckwater Quad and at Oxford wrote to Regy, ‘thought of him every day, dreamed of him when he dreamed at all and slept with his letter under his pillow, kissing it often in the night.’ (17) Reginald confided to his journal on 19th October 1879 that ‘Ernle growls at being misunderstood by his teachers at Oxford. As if any life worth living ever was understood by contemporary critics.’ (18)
Reginald surprised his friend in July 1879 by the announcement of his engagement to Eleanor Frances Weston Van der Weyer (they were married on 24th September 1879 at Winkfield Church). Ernle seems to have taken the news lightly and ‘wrote congratulating his friend, full of speculation about the bride and whether she could possibly be good enough for Regy. The news had taken Ernle by surprise, and he could not help feeling jealous of her. A few days later he wrote again. He had had a sort of breakdown: the news had been a greater shock to him than he had first supposed.’ (19) A month after being informed of the engagement Ernle writes to Reginald and one can sense the loss within his heart as he puts his pain into a poem:

‘O love, it haunts me the old pain!
And since I may no more caress
Those graceful curls of your dear head
To live in grief, to die were gain,
And, if I may not love you less,
But still must sorrow for love fled,
I pray harsh love to strike me dead…’ (20)

We find Ernle, a 22 year old single undergraduate in the 1881 census, taken in April that year. He is visiting the home of William Strudwick, a 47 year old bricklayer and his wife Ann and child Alfred, 11, in Guildford, Surrey. Also with Ernle are two friends, both undergraduates, Francis G. A. Phillips (born Ludlow 1860) and Robert L. Ottley (born Richmond, Yorkshire 1857) (21).
In 1881 Ernle entered the Home Service; the Malvern College Register, 1865-1904 (1905. p. 66) states that he was then appointed to the General Post Office before being transferred to the Home Office, in May 1882, according to the London Gazette, he was appointed to Clerk in the Home Office.
In early 1884 his volume of poetry – ‘Ilaria and Other Poems’ is published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. London. Ernle dedicates the volume of poetry to the Reverend Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, himself, a dabbler in poetry and like Reginald Brett, he was taught at Eton by William Johnson [Cory]. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he was ordained in 1872 and became a priest two years later; in 1910 he became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, a position he kept for the remainder of his life.
The volume contains 16 poems and the opening title poem, ‘Ilaria’, which I consider one of his finest and shows Johnson’s extensive study of the great poets such as Spenser, Keats and Tennyson, is set in Italy, where the Duke’s daughter, Ilaria, heiress to his estate and fortune; a young girl whose parents ‘loved pale antiquity, and held / their way apart from all the growth of change’ (IV) wanders the lonely castle, a ‘place with large halls and wide terraces, / and galleries which love light feet, and bowers / where one may quit the state of palaces, / and by the window sit, and count the showers, / or wake the secret spirit hid away / in an old harp, or dream on Dante’s lay.’ (II)  There are some strangely melodious lines throughout its 59 stanzas which ring with all the dark clarity of Browning and lyrical depth of Tennyson –

‘Old longings, fearings; sacred memories;
In rooms untenanted a presence strange;
A beckoning ghost which still before us flies,
A voice which calls and, ere we follow, dies.’ (XII)

And again: 
‘This wonder followed her into her sleep,
And all night long in a deserted wood
She seemed to chase a wandering song, and leap
O’er desperate ravine and boiling flood
Io-like, stung by unexplained desire
Banishing her from sleep and homelike things,’ (XLI)

And the peculiarly bewitching – ‘secure at last to find / seclusion, and cool rest, and grateful gloom / such as the mind’s sprites love to revel in.’ (XXX)
Within the confines of the castle, ‘in the pale kingdom of the dead, / youth like a wild flower raised its perfect head.’ (XIII) and Ilaria, ‘stately as an old-world grace, / free as green leaves’ (XIV) sees the inconsistency around her, yet ‘how could she look and keep a sorry heart?’ (XXIX) ‘But the old world dreams in which the castle slept find no response in Ilaria’s heart. She longs to be up and doing, redressing poor men’s wrongs and breaking down the iron rule of tyranny.’ (22) She wants to change the way the world is –

‘And there will spring a garden in the low
Lush meads where once was swamp and reedy waste,’ (LIV)
Ilaria falls in love and weds the low-born Caspar in secret and they flee into the night, ‘amid the farewell-whispering trees’.
There are some fine poems amongst the collection such as ‘Daphnis’, the Sicilian shepherd-boy; ‘Cephalus & Aurora’, ‘Bertram’, ‘Puerilia’, ‘The Sybil’ and ‘The Quest of Psyche’, a 40 stanza Spenserian study. Johnson shows that he is proficient with the sonnet form:

SONNET

In the ripe heyday of the summer’s height
A blighting sadness falls from cloudless skies,
And souls which inward peer with curious eyes
Find fairest dreams the prey of foulest night.
Allurement cheats, and like a bubble breaks,
Unstable even in memory, though in sight
How far out-matching absent fancy’s might
To paint the contour of her roseate cheeks.
What broken work is this, which breaks the hearts
Of poets in their early manhood? Doom
For generous breath how hard, to leave the bloom
Of fond enticing charm eye youth departs,
From Juliet’s garden through sad Elsinore
Driven to Cordelia’s tomb on the lone moor. (Ilaria. p. 86)

‘O bleak and chill o’er plain and vale and mountain-slope’ has elements of Hardy’s dark romantic mood:

O bleak and chill o’er plain and vale and mountain-slope
The east wind goes:
The trees stand joyless, skies are cheerless, without hope,
Deep, deep the snows:
The sheep are crowded by the hedge; no living thing
Moves anywhere:
Folded away sleeps hope with buried seeds till Spring
Bid her rise fair.
O, draw the curtain, love, shut out the waste of wold
So dim, so drear;
Come to the fire and let me hold that head of gold
As near as dear,
And let the snows heap o’er our roof a silent grave,
So we may prove
Safe from the cold which bites, the winds which rave,
One hour of love. (Ilaria. p. 77)

Perhaps the most beautiful poem in the volume, in my opinion, is ‘Often when the benign moon with her beams’, a rather melancholy little piece: 

Often when the benign moon with her beams
The face of night with tremulous beauty takes,
Touched through the tangled veil of midnight dreams
My heart unto itself low music makes.
Dawn comes, but whence the unwonted peace of mind
Supplanting morn’s too common meed of care,
Quiet and joy, a temper all resigned,
Indwelling where fierce pangs too often are?
Son! on your mother’s breast last night you lay,
Nature bent over you, wondering and mild,
Breathed on you, kissed you softly, and to-day
Your flesh returns as that of a young child.
Not without pangs has she beheld you grow
To works and thoughts and woes beyond her ken,
Not without yearning did she see you go
To mix in the unrestful life of men.
And though you scorn, neglect her, yet when most
Baffled in strife, belated in the race,
With hot ambition fevered, tempest-tost –
‘Tis all her love can do – she turns a face
Upon your inward soul, fair still and full
Of a strong patient peace which salves all sores,
In hushed communion, deep and wonderful,
Imparting her heart’s inner peace to yours;
In hours of rest, in lonely lovely places,
In the wood’s voices or the speech of streams,
In tender memories, in chastened faces,
Or, as last night, in the deep vale of dreams. (Ilaria. p. 75-76)

And finally the quite profound ‘Love’s Evolution’ which begins: ‘Can Love, high Love, with mocking glamour shine?’ and seems to answer that ‘Love is true Love; nought can my strong creed shake’ –

‘He, the complete, the world’s perfected soul,
(O happy ye, who grow into the grace
Of his new spell, and find his fairer face!)
Admits such limitation, yet being whole
He wasteth not his breath on any flower,
Nor lingereth on a lady’s pearly hand,
The dreamy pastures of his old Life’s land
He has foregone for realms of wider power;’ (Ilaria. p. 103)

It’s true to say that some of the poems are indeed juvenile yet on the whole the volume was well received and praised, particularly the title poem, The Graphic, even suggesting that Ilaria, in wedding her ‘low-born lover’, she was ‘selfishly deserting her proper duties for the sake of personal gratification’, (23) something perhaps contemporary readers can relate to in the wake of the present monarchy.
Two years after the publication of ‘Ilaria’, Ernle is appointed private secretary to Mr. Charles Beilby Stuart-Wortley (1851-1926) the English statesman educated at Rugby and Baliol College, Oxford who was admitted to the Bar, Inner Temple in 1876 and became Under Secretary of State for the Home Office. (24)
In 1890 Ernle, who became a member of the Clifton Society, is living at 94 Chelsea Gardens, St George’s, Hanover Square, London and in April 1891, we find him on the census, a ‘Clerk in Home Office’, aged 32 and single, and he is boarding at a house in Welbeck Street, St Marylebone, London (25). A year later in1892 he is living at 7 Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street, Whitechapel.
His mother Lucy died on 24th December 1893 and also in 1893 Reginald Brett anonymously published his volume of poetry ‘Foam’ (Macmillan. London. 1893).
In 1895 Ernle published a 42 page volume entitled ‘A Day on the March’ (David Stott. 370 Oxford Street, London) but unfortunately I can find no information concerning this publication.
On 9th April 1896 Ernle married Minnie Wilson at All Saints Church, Fulham. Minnie is 13 years his junior, born in London in 1871. A few months later, on Friday 25th September [1896] Ernle, along with fellow speaker, Mr. Robert Crawford Hawkin (1871-1939), give a talk on ‘Armenia’ at Queen’s Park Hall, Harrow Road, London. (26)
In July 1898 Ernle and his family are living at Headley Lodge, 45 Croydon Road, Anerley, Surrey. (27)
In March 1901 Ernle and Minnie are living in Chalfont Road, Croydon, Surrey – Ernle is 42 years old and a ‘retired civil servant’; Minnie is 30 years old (born in Sydenham, London in 1871) and their daughter, Clarissa M is 9 years old (born in 1892, Windsor, Berkshire). They have a domestic servant living with them named Kate Killick who is 22 years old and born in Tadworth, Surrey. (28)
In April 1911 Ernle, aged 53, Minnie aged 40 and daughter Clarissa May aged 17 (born in London in 1894) are living with the Simmons family at Hillsea House, Westhamptnett, Bognor, Sussex (29). Strangely, under ‘years married’ Minnie gives 19 – she and Ernle were married in 1896 which would only be 15 years (and daughter Clarrisa  being born in 1894 is born two years before the marriage of Ernle and Minnie) but perhaps this is a transcription error; however, it is not the only inconsistency connected to Minnie Johnson and her inaccuracy with dates! Ten years later in the 1921 census taken on 19th June, we find Minnie Johnson, aged 45 and born in London in 1876 (she seems to be getting younger!), a ‘wife’ with no occupation and her daughter, Clarissa, aged 22 (and 1 month which would give her birth as May, hence her middle name) and born in London in 1899 (also distinctly decreasing in age!), living at 24, Vicar’s Close, St. Andrew, Wells, Somerset (30). Ernle is not on the record and it is possible that prior to this he suffered some sort of mental breakdown. I can only deduce that Clarissa moves away, possibly to marry because in 1926 Minnie places an advert in the Wells Journal (Friday 11th June 1926. p. 4) – ‘Girl required to help in the house. Apply Johnson, 24 Vicar’s Close, Wells’, and a year later, also in the Wells Journal (Friday 22nd April 1927. p. 4) under situations vacant we find: ‘Girl wanted to help with housework – Apply Mrs Johnson, 24 Vicar’s Close, Wells. Another ad appeared in the Wells Journal in 1932 under the title ‘Lost’ – ‘10/- Reward – Lost about 4 weeks ago, an 18 carat Gold Crest Ring (Tiger’s Head). The above reward will be given if finder returns to Mrs. Ernle Johnson, 24 Vicar’s Close, Wells (Wells Journal. Friday 26 February 1932. p. 8)
In 1935 Ernle and Minnie are named as beneficiaries (Ernle as 2nd beneficiary) upon the death of Martha Sophia Roberts who died on 8th November 1935 aged 79; the probate was held on 18th December in Wells.
In the 1939 Register taken on 29th September, Minnie is still living at 24, Vicar’s Close, Wells and she gives her birth as 4th October 1878, she states that she is ‘married’ and under occupation she writes ‘private means’. She is living there with a single woman named Marie Berckey born in July 1886 and also living off her ‘private means’. (31) Just three months later, Ernle died on 19th December 1939 in Barnwood, Gloucester and he was buried in St Lawrence’s Churchyard, Barnwood on 2nd January 1940. It is probable that he died as a patient at Barnwood House Asylum. His obituary appeared on page 9 of the April 1940 edition of The Malvernian: ‘Ernle Sacheverell Wilberforce Johnson (5.77), Eng Verse, West Prize. Senior Chapel Prefect. Scholar Christ Church, Oxford. Home Civil Service. Barrister Inner Temple. Died Jan 1940’ [sic] and a brief mention in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (Saturday 6th January 1940. p. 15) but on the whole he seems to have passed away quite unnoticed. An inscription upon his gravestone reads:

‘He came out of great tribulation’

During the war his wife, Minnie seems to get in trouble with the authorities, not once, but twice. She is living at 24, Vicar’s Close, Wells, and on the night in question, P. W. K. Harvey, ‘said at 8.30 p.m. he was at the Police Station and received a telephone message of a light showing in the Vicar’s Close. He went there and found that the light came from a bedroom window at No. 24. There was only a thin lace curtain covering the window.’ The witness knocked at the door and rang the bell but there was no reply so the door was broken open and the black-out put up. ‘”Next day”, said the witness, “I interviewed the defendant [Minnie Johnson] and asked her why she didn’t come downstairs in reply to my knocking, and she replied, ‘I heard a noise and thought it was a bomb.’ Defendant wrote that she had forgotten about the black-out. She added ‘that she put the noise made down to a bomb or machine gun firing. A fine of £1 was imposed.’ (32) A year later she is caught again showing a light at Vicar’s Close and was summoned. ‘P.C. Baker said at 8 p.m. he saw lights being displayed from two downstair windows’. She was fined 10 shillings. (33) Minnie Johnson died aged 81 on 5th May 1950 in Wells, Somerset and an auction of her possessions was held by Thomas Wicks & Son: ‘Estate Mrs. M Johnson, decd [deceased] 24, Vicar’s Close, Wells. Important sale of Antiques and other Household Furniture’, the auction took place at 24 Vicar’s Close, Wells on 5th July 1950 (Wells Journal. Friday 23rd June 1950. p. 6). Minnie Johnson’s beneficiary was named as Ernle’s younger brother, Basil, who passes away himself not long after from a fall at his home, Judge’s Lodgings, New Street, Wells on Sunday 10th December 1950, aged 89. (34) Minnie Johnson’s death in 1950 aged 81 would give her birth year as 1868-69 but as she seemed to declare her age upon the whims of vanity the loss of a decade or so for a lady may be quite forgiven but not for historical purposes!
Ernle, not too unlike Reginald Brett, seemed to relinquish the poet within his soul and conform to a different attitude and perhaps it is no coincidence that Ernle married in the wake of the Wilde trial and his imprisonment –

‘Perhaps everyone has always felt the presence of two distinctly different natures, one sometimes standing in a neutral and critical attitude towards the other.’  [Journal of Reginald Brett. 20th October 1875] (35) 


NOTES:

1. ‘Love’s Evolution’. Ilaria and Other Poems. Ernle Johnson. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. London. 1884. p. 103.
2. Reverend George Herbert Johnson, M.A., born in Oxford in 1855, the eldest son of the Very Reverend George Henry Sacheverell Johnson, Dean of Wells; aged 19 George went up to Exeter College, Oxford on 16th October 1874; B.A., 1877, M.A., 1882. He became Vicar of Crockham, Kent (1880-1886) and married Amy Caroline Cameron Galton (1858-1939) at Lambeth Palace Chapel 22nd June 1882.
3. Dr. Arthur Basil Noel Johnson (1861-1942), 3rd son of the Very Reverend George Henry Sacheverell Johnson, Dean of Wells; Arthur attended Malvern College as an Exhibitioner; Class, Upper IVth-VIth; School Prefect; House Eleven Cricket. Latin Prose, Greek Prose. Organist to the School 1876-79. Aged 19 Arthur went up to Magdalen College, Oxford on 16th October 1880; Second Class Mods. B.A., 1884. Clerk 1880-83. He spent 2 years at the Royal College of Music; Stanford (composition); Organist and Music Master at Rugby School in 1886 and Precentor and Organist at Eton College. He married Elizabeth Anne Percival (only daughter of Rev. Dr. John Percival (1834-1918), first Headmaster of Clifton College [1862-78], President of Trinity College, Oxford [1879-87], Headmaster of Rugby School [1887-95] and Bishop of Hereford) in Rugby on 29th December 1891 and died on 10th December 1950, aged 89 at Judge’s Lodgings, New Street, Wells. His wife, Anne, died in Wells on 10th June 1941. [1861 Census for England and Wales. RG09. 893/87. p. 17]
4. 1871 Census for England and Wales. RG10. Piece: 2460, folio: 15, schedule: 89, p. 22.
5. Ernle was put forward for membership of the Debating Society in October 1873, [The Malvernian (School magazine) October 1873. p. 78] appointed to Secretary in February 1875 and was made President by October 1876. see Malvern College Register, 1865-1904. (1905).
6. The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher. James Lees-Milne. Sidgwick & Jackson. London. 1986. p. 29.
7. Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, volume I, 1870-1903. edited by Maurice V. Brett. Ivor Nicholson & Watson Limited. London. 1934. p. 15.
8. Lees-Milne. P. 29.
9. Journal entries quoted from ‘Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times’. Morris B. Kaplan. Cornell University Press. 2005. p. 140.
10. Reginald Brett’s Journal: 6th March 1875, as quoted in Lees-Milne, p. 33.
11. Extracts from Journals, 1872-1881. Reginald Brett. Bowes & Bowes. Cambridge. 1908. p. 127-128. (also quoted in: ‘Alternatives in Biography: Writing lives in Diverse English Language Contexts’. Chapter III Uranian Autobiography. Stephen Hardy, Michael Kaylor, Martina Horakova, Katerina Prajznerova. Masaryk University Press. 2011 [2014 ed. p. 181]).
12. ibid. p. 129.
13. ibid. p. 132.
14. Mr. Johnson’s Poems. The Malvernian. April 1884. p. 26-27.
15. Extracts from the Prize Poem, 1877. The Malvernian. August 1877. p. 479-480.
16. ‘Mr. Ernle S. W. Johnson, of Malvern College, has gained an open Junior Studentship at Christ Church College, Oxford, and comes out head of the list.’ Wells Journal. Thursday 1st March 1877. p. 8.
17. Lees-Milne. P. 39.
18. Extracts from Journals, 1872-1881. p. 201.
19. Lees-Milne. P. 47. The author also tells us that ‘Ernle had been very ill, and his parents had come to Oxford to look after him.’ (p. 50).
20. Letter: Ernle to Reginald. 27th August 1879. Lees-Milne. p. 48.
21. 1881 Census for England and Wales. RG11. 775/66. p. 21. Both of Ernle’s visiting friends entered the church. Rev. Francis George Anderson Phillips (1857-1943) M.A. Christ Church, Oxford. Vicar of Holy Trinity, Northwich; vicar of Highmore, Henley-on-Thames (1893), vicar of Clovelly Church (resigned 1899), vicar of Bloxham, Oxford (1899). Rev. Robert Lawrence Ottley (1856-1933) of Pembroke College, Oxford; Senior Student and Tutor of Christ Church, Oxford (1881), Vice Principle of Cuddesdon Theological College (1886), Dean of Divinity at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford (1890) and Principle of Pusey House, Oxford (1893). He is also the author of many theological volumes.
22. Mr. Johnson’s Poems. The Malvernian. April 1884. p. 26-27.
23. ‘Recent Poetry and Verse’. The Graphic. 7th June 1884. p. 562.
24. Morning Post. Saturday 11th September 1886. p. 5.
25. 1891 Census for England and Wales. RG12. 92/127. p. 9.
26. The Daily News. Friday 25th September 1896. p. 2.
27. The London Gazette. 19th July 1898.
28. 1901 Census for England and Wales. RG13. 28/127. p. 6.
29. 1911 Census for England and Wales. RG14. 451/216. p. 1.
30. 1921 Census for England and Wales. RG15. Piece: 11374, schedule: 46 (schedule type E).
31. 1939 Register. RG101/70441/007/43.
32. ‘Thought it was bombs’. Wells Journal. Friday 11th October 1940. p. 3.
33. Wells Journal. Friday 12th December 1941. p. 1.
34. ‘A Recent Will – In the will of Dr. Arthur Basil Noel Johnson which appeared in our issue of June 1st it was stated that £200 was left to Miss Minnie Johnson, of 24, Vicar’s Close, Wells. This should have been Mrs. Minnie Johnson.’ Wells Journal. Friday 15th June 1951. p. 5.
35. Lees-Milne. p. 36.

RICHARD GEOFFREY WORSLEY

 
 

 

THE DEATH OF A DANCING FAUN

RICHARD GEOFFREY WORSLEY 1912-1928

BY

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

‘I am sure you are devoted to music, you have the musical physiognomy.’

[The Dancing Faun. Florence Farr. 1894]

 
 
 
Thomas Cuthbert Worsley (1907-1977), schoolmaster and critic, is the son of the eccentric Dean of Llandaff, a man who ‘disliked and distrusted the Welsh’ and a man whose life reads like a series of Pickwickian misadventures. In Thomas Cuthbert’s autobiographical volume, ‘Flannelled Fool: a Slice of Life in the Thirties’, published in 1967, he paints a vivid portrait of his rather strange upbringing as the son of the wayward Dean and describes with psychological precision his time at Cambridge where ‘the years had slipped by under the shadow of a wasteful attachment to a friend’; he also writes about his complete and utter ignorance of sex, knowing nothing of masturbation at the age of nineteen; his own sexual awakenings during his time as a schoolmaster and of his time at Gordonstoun school at the invitation of its founder, Kurt Hahn (1886-1974) where they ending up throwing books at each others’ heads! But most poignant of all is his astonishing remarks as to the death of his younger brother Richard Geoffrey Worsley, whom he names ‘Benjamin’ (‘Bengy’) in the book, by drowning in 1928.
Born in Durham in 1907, Thomas Cuthbert Worsley was the fourth of five children (1) born to Frederick William Worsley (1873-1956) who was born in Singapore and Catherine Ethel Payne (1874-1956), born Calcutta, West Bengal, who were married in 1901; his father, Frederick, D.D. (Durham University), M.A. (Cambridge) a man who thought his children were just a distraction and didn’t even bother to visit Cuthbert at Marlborough College where he was ‘always cold and usually hungry’ for the first four years (although he did write once a year on his birthday) is a peculiar sort of man, easily bored by achievements whose ‘remoteness seemed part of his superiority’.
Cuthbert attended the Cathedral School at Llandaff which was established in 1880 to educate the boy choristers of the Cathedral choir. From there he went to Brightlands Preparatory School, Nenham on Severn in Gloucestershire which opened as a boys’ boarding school in 1908. Here, Cuthbert won his scholarship to Marlborough.
At Cambridge (St John’s College) Cuthbert could ‘pride myself after two years at University that I had never opened a book, apart from the set of books for the Classical Tripos: and even these were shamefully neglected’. (2) His father, Canon Worsley who had spent most of his time playing golf, billiards and drawing pictures of nude women, in fact, anything to distract from the boredom of clerical duties, became Dean of Llandaff. At home, Canon Worsley and his wife had been estranged for several years, they did not speak to each other and the notion of ‘family’ was just pretence. One day, after a silent dinner, the Dean announced – ‘I am leaving here tomorrow. You can all find yourselves somewhere else to live.’ (3) The next day he left without a word. Later we learn, as did Cuthbert himself, that his father came from a long line of country baronets; Canon Worsley’s brother, Frank, won the ‘Sword of Honour’ and ‘seduced his Colonel’s daughter’ before being wounded and decorated in the Great War, marrying his nurse from the hospital and giving her a daughter, all before discharging himself from hospital, abandoning them and going into permanent hiding which seems a common trait of the Worsley men! The Canon himself, Frederick, was born in Singapore, educated at Brighton College, worked in a bank where there was some ‘incident with the till’, tried to enter the acting profession before deciding to study at London University, and take Holy Orders; he was ordained in 1897. Not long after his marriage to Catherine in 1901, the ‘first signs of the fatal pattern began to show’, he was ‘bored by his success; he was unhappy as a mere curate.’ He took a ‘living’ in Lincolnshire, a gift from a cousin and spent all his time shooting and fishing; when the first child ‘John’ (actually Francis Frederick Worsley) was born in 1902, the proud mother, Catherine, was shocked to find her husband, the ‘future Dean in what they call a compromising position with the nursery maid’. (4) A ‘bastard son’ was born to the maid and to prevent scandal she was paid off and dismissed. The church of course took a dim view of this and Frederick was ‘inhibited’ which meant he could not administer the sacrament for two years. Wanting to better himself, the family spent two years in Durham while Reverend Worsley studied for his Doctorate – it was at Durham that Cuthbert was born on 10^th December 1907. Still unhappy, Frederick wanted an ‘Oxbridge’ education so he could get a better teaching job and spent two years post graduate at Clare College, Cambridge – it was at Cambridge while living at Cavendish Avenue in 1912 that the fifth and last child was born: ‘Bengy’ (Richard Geoffrey Worsley). Cuthbert tells us that ‘”Benjamin” was three years younger than I, and from the very first commanded the worship of the women in the family, of mother and Miss Maclaren [the nanny] and of my sister. And even my father had a small corner of his affections for this youngest son. Surrounded by the admiration of the women, Bengy grew up protected and fostered to a degree which couldn’t help exciting in us envy, disguised as contempt.’ So we can see that from the first little ‘Bengy’ caused a lot of jealousy and resentful feelings within the Worsley household among the boys and mother, Catherine was particularly fond of her youngest child. Cuthbert goes on to say that ‘he had evidently inherited a good share of our father’s brilliance. He read, painted and wrote with considerable promise at a very early age. But his special passion was for dancing which became, under my sister’s encouragement, his chief means of self-expression.
Most of his childhood he seemed to spend dancing, dressed up in bright clothes from the acting box, made-up to the eyes, improvising to the music of the old gramophone which the willing women worked for him as they sat in their admitting circle at his feet.
It can be imagined how we other boys of the family, grossly conventional in our outlook, viewed this, as it seemed to us, revolting cissy spectacle. Yet it was this boy-girl with his painted lips and mascara-ed eyes, his interchange between male and female dress, who at last, and just by being that, had succeeded in drawing my mother out of the self-absorption of her private grief, in taming the tough Miss Maclaren and occasionally – wonder of wonders – delaying my father on his way to the golf course.
Was it somehow with this pretty androgynous creature that my own emotions had got stuck? For I wasn’t yet sufficiently emotionally clear of the tragedy which overtook him to analyse the effect of that on myself.’ (5)
Meanwhile, their father, Frederick, failed his examinations and had to take a third year of study becomes Assistant Warden at the Theological College in Llandaff before he surprised the family and took off to war; he was interviewed on 29^th October 1915 and declared medically fit for service and posted to France the following month attached to a Casualty Clearing Station. He served as an Army Chaplain in France and Italy; in August 1916 he was ill with trench fever but returned to duty with the British Red Cross a month later. At the end of the war he was reluctant to hurry back to the family – there was a ‘little widow woman in Genoa’ who kept him busy. She even came to England and set up a house in London to which the Warden retreated much too often. His unorthodox behaviour did not go unnoticed.
As for ‘Benjamin’, Cuthbert tells us that ‘James [Cuthbert’s older brother, William Lister Worsley] and I paid scant attention to Bengy during our growing years. As children we had had him dumped on us all too often when the grown-ups were busy. He was so much younger at that stage that he couldn’t join in our rough nine or ten year old scrambles. Being thoroughly spoiled, though, he wasn’t content to tag along, and would soon be off sneaking to the adults that we weren’t including him in our play.
But as all of us grew up, he learned well enough to amuse himself in his own eccentric way. James and I were mad on golf, and we had also been given a discarded motor-bike by brother John [Francis Frederick Worsley]. These pursuits were all absorbing, and seemed to us, little philistines as we were, altogether more healthy than the dancing and the messing about with a toy theatre which occupied Bengy’s time.’ (6)
The Dean of Llandaff was given an ultimatum and had to remove the ‘little widow woman’ from his life; it was this which caused the great rift between Frederick and Catherine Worsley and they hardly spoke a civil word between them for eleven years after until Warden Worsley was made Dean – ‘now there came into the picture a little masseuse from Tonypandy’ whom he took to resorts and clerical meetings – it was a ‘fatal attraction’, but why did Catherine put up with this disgraceful behaviour? The end was surely in sight, and so it was, the Dean either decided or was forced to resign on ‘ill health’ in October 1929 and gave up the official residence of the Dean; by June the following year he was claiming Clerical Disabilities.
For Cuthbert, who admits to being a ‘social, intellectual and athletic’ snob’ cricket and other games supplied a ‘pretence of virility’, but in fact he was hiding his ‘repression of sexual potency. The excessive value placed on the athlete made my ignorance acceptable both to myself and others. It enabled me to escape noticing what in fact was missing. The generalised homo-eroticism which I discovered in the rituals of the playing fields satisfied my inclinations enough to keep them “pure”.’ (7)
Bearing these sentiments in mind it is difficult to understand his feelings towards his younger brother, ‘Benjamin’, for he says that ‘we didn’t dislike him: indeed we both [Cuthbert and William] grew fond of him as we grew older. But we were – or I was at least – a good deal ashamed of, and embarrassed by, all that dressing up in girl’s clothes and that shameless painting of the lips.’ He continues, saying that, ‘our parents were even more divided and incompetent over what should be done about their bizarre offspring than they were about us. What sort of education should he have? Was dancing really a career possible for a boy? (it must be remembered that in those days there was no Royal Ballet nor anything like it.) He was taken up for an audition with one of the better known ballet teachers of the time, Espinoza, (8) who pronounced him a budding genius, and took him for a time into his classes.
Quite why this arrangement was abandoned I didn’t bother to discover. Probably it was the parental situation. Mother was incapable of making decisions: father was too pre-occupied with himself to do so. As a result Bengy was taken away from the ballet school and sent back to the Cathedral School from which he had earlier been withdrawn. This school had very much gone down since our day, and some hint of his getting into sexual trouble there reached us. It wouldn’t have been surprising.’ (9) Cuthbert, of course, being just as much a sneak as his younger brother, yet old enough that he should know better, informs his father, the Dean, who is in charge of the Cathedral School, of his little brother’s indiscretions. Nevertheless, it does not stop Bengy from winning a scholarship to St Edward’s College, Oxford, even though ‘he was so obviously quite unfitted for public school life.’ (10)
 Another factor, which probably played a major part in the Dean’s decision to break-up the family and in Cuthbert’s development, was the death of the youngest son, Bengy, who had won a scholarship to St Edward’s College, Oxford, by drowning. It occurred on Sunday 15^th July 1928 while Cuthbert and ‘Bengy’, both non-swimmers, were in the sea bathing at Dunraven Bay, Southerndown, Glamorgan. Cuthbert says in Flannelled Fool that ‘it was during a hot summer spell that we went bathing one Sunday at the nearest strip of coast. Had we all abandoned any pretence of being connected with the Deanery? Yet mother was most improbably there too, and it was a Sunday. The newspapers were to make much of that and there were any number of anonymous ill-wishers who wrote afterwards proclaiming the accident a judgement on us.
John, I and Bengy were the bathing party and John was not in the water when it happened. James was unfortunately not with us, and he was the only member of the family who could swim.’ (11) Cuthbert goes on to say that ‘on this summer’s day, then, I couldn’t swim nor could Bengy. We were playing together, chest deep in the water, in a small cove formed by two rocky points. It wasn’t rough but there were the kind of waves which it is fun for non-swimmers to play in. Suddenly without either of us realising it was happening, we were out of our depth. Swiftly, before we could recover, some current or other had carried us out further to sea in the direction of one of the points. We clung together, went down and came up, spluttering, gurgling, choking, out of control.
Now we were down fighting the green water, now we had a glimpse of sky, a mouthful of air and salt mixed: now it was only mouthful after mouthful of water. I suppose it didn’t take long, it seemed an eternity. Soon we were simply fighting for life and fighting not only for life, but fighting each other. I was the older and stronger. I got free. I wasn’t any longer at that point a non-swimmer. I made for the head of the point, and got there. And I lay there fighting to get back my breath, to get the water out of my lungs.
Bengy was carried right round the point. Our struggles had been observed. Swimmers had gone in and they brought him to shore in the next bay. He was dead. Artificial respiration went on for an hour. But there was no reviving him.
It was particularly appalling that mother was there on the beach to see the calamity. I revived pretty quickly.’ Cuthbert had to telephone his father, the Dean (‘why me?’ he asks), – ‘”You bloody fool, you!” was his comment.’ (12)
Cuthbert goes on to say that ‘however gentle everyone was with me, I had the facts to face. I was alive and he was dead. He, the specially beloved of them all, the little genius, the most precious of any of us, hadn’t survived. I had. And how could I forget that in the final climax of that deadly crisis, I had cast him off? I had torn myself free. If I hadn’t, there would, of course, have been two deaths instead of one. True. But I had, I had actually, physically, deliberately, wilfully torn his clutching hands away from my thighs.’ (13)
Two days later, an article in the Western Mail reported on the incident and the inquest:
 
 ‘Death Trap to Bathers. The Danger Spot at Southerndown. Coroner’s Comments. Tribute to Plucky Policeman. – The lack of notices warning bathers against the dangerous spots on the coast at Southerndown and Ogmore-by-Sea, where two tragedies occurred on Sunday, was commented upon by a doctor and the coroner (Mr. S. H. Stockwood) at the inquest at Bridgend on Monday on Richard Geoffrey Worsley, the fifteen year old son of Dr. F. W. Worsley, Dean of Llandaff, who was drowned whilst bathing at Southerndown on Sunday. The coroner said that the only notice was that erected by the forbears of the Earl of Dunraven, which had been posted on the Dunraven Castle wall ever since he (the coroner) was a boy, and which was hidden when there were a few cars parked there. The Coroner said he had been hoping that the commoners and the Lord of the manor might do something in the matter, but he intended in any event to write to the council in whose district the bathing beach was situated.
The story of the drama was told by Mr. Thomas Cuthbert Worsley, an undergraduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who is home on vacation. He said he was at Southerndown with his mother and brother on Sunday. “We were down on the beach at Dunraven Bay and my brother, Richard Geoffrey, and myself went in to bathe. We entered the water on the Witches Point side. I could swim a few strokes, but my brother could not swim at all. My mother and brother Francis were on the beach. The tide was just on the turn.” Witness said they had been in about five or six minutes when Richard looked as if he had been knocked over by a wave. “I walked over and found there was a pool there, and I went down. My brother’s head went back. He was about five yards from me. When my feet gave way I tried to swim, and he clutched hold of me, and I fell. We both went under and I lost him. When I came up again I heard him cry out, and another wave came and I went under again. I then remembered that the rock known as Witches Point was a few yards away and I got to the rock and lay there.”
Thought Brother was Saved.
The Coroner: Were you conscious that you had drifted towards that point? – No; but I realise now that we must have been carried to the east.
Can you say whether you were conscious on the rock? – I think I was.
You went to your mother thinking your brother had been got out? – Yes.
Can you tell me what were you conscious of all the time you were slipping about – were you conscious of currents? – No, but I knew that whereas I had been in my depth I was suddenly out of it.
Francis Frederick Worsley said he saw his brothers go in the water and kept them more or less in view. “The first indication I had of something unusual was when I noticed they were getting near Witches Point; so I walked to the edge of the water by the point and shouted to them, but they did not appear to hear.”
“Bobbing Up and Down.”
“I did not really worry much until I saw that Richard, the younger one, was bobbing up and down in a curious way,” added witness. “I thought my other brother was also fighting a bit. As I am unable to swim I ran across to the nearest party, in which was Dr. Cook, of Cardiff, and then ran back and crossed Witches Point. I went into the water the other side of the point and then I saw Richard floating with his head down and got hold of him and started to pull him in. I was joined by two other men. We got him onto the sand, and artificial respiration was resorted to without success.”
Doctor’s Experience.
Dr. Herbert George Graham Cook said Mr. Worsley came up and asked him whether he could swim. “I am not a strong swimmer, and not very young,” said the doctor; “so I shouted to my son up the beach, who is a strong swimmer, and I went off myself. I went into the water, and near Witches Point I went into a deep pool, which I got through, and scrambled out the sand the other side of the point. Then I saw Mr. Worsley and another man wading out, and they got hold of the boy.” Dr. Ralph Downing and Dr. Leigh helped in the work of artificial respiration with Major Budd. The doctor added that it was very dangerous at this spot. The holes there were very steep – nothing to a strong swimmer, but rather terrifying for a poor one.
The Coroner: I am afraid the currents are there even at the lowest tide, and the most dangerous time is when the tide is full up.
Police-Constable Joseph Sansom said it was quite easy to see several currents working. They would be extremely dangerous to anyone who was not a strong swimmer. It was notorious that Witches Point was dangerous.
Dr. Cook referring to the coroner’s remarks, said that if a warning notice was put up in a prominent place, where it could not fail to be seen by visitors, lives might be saved. A verdict of “Accidental death” was returned.
Requiem for Son of Dean of Llandaff.
In connection with the funeral of Richard Geoffrey Worsley, son of the Dean of Llandaff, we are asked to state that a requiem will be sang in the Cathedral to-day (Tuesday) at 10.15 a.m., and the Burial will follow immediately. (14)
 
When Cuthbert left Cambridge he was at a loss as to his future prospects and so he fell into what all apathetic undergraduates fall into – teaching; he became an assistant master at Wellington College (simply known as ‘College’ in ‘Flannelled Fool’) and having failed to keep control of the History class had to resort to the administering of a ‘beating’ with the cane; five trouble-makers were ‘massacred’ in this way and the discipline problem was solved! ‘Cuthie’ reveals some frank sexual feelings and activities such as his first memorable erection as a schoolboy at Brightlands School when he was in Mr. Donavon’s side-car with his chosen ‘little friend’ on his knee, or his ten days in Munich with a boy named Heinz who showed him what to do with his erection, or his seduction of Mr. Leith, one of the masters at Wellington, all rather quaint now but in the thirties really quite dangerous behaviour (though not uncommon). There’s the usual disagreements and fights between the younger, more ‘left-wing’ members of staff, and the unmovable, traditional, ‘old-guard’, masters such as ‘Talboys’ (Rollo St. Clare Tallboys, 1877-1953) and ‘Hoffman, the Hun’, differences which figure prominently among schoolmasters and the Headmaster, Malim (Frederick Blagden Malim, Master of Wellington College from 1921-37) who walks a line between the two factions.
Later, we hear that his father, four years after walking out on the family is asking for £500 or he will be in jail – apparently he tried to set himself up as an Estate Agent in Portsmouth and his partner went off with the deposits – the money was sent to him, ‘twice’; eventually he was ‘pensioned off’ if he ‘promised to stay put in Bath and not attempt any more business ventures’. (15) And here he remained, taking up bowls (during the war he became a clerk in the Admiralty Administrative Branch, in Bath, and some years after the war in 1956 he ‘died at his desk’, aged 83. His obituary appeared in the Western Mail: ‘Former Dean of Llandaff
 
A former Dean of Llandaff, the Very Rev. Frederick William Worsley aged 83, has died at Bath. Although he was an Englishman he spoke Welsh well and conducted a weekly service in Welsh at Llandaff Cathedral. Canon Worsley was educated at King’s College, London, Durham University and Clare College, Cambridge. He came to Cardiff in 1914 as sub-warden of St Michael’s College and was collated in the Canonry of Farewell in Llandaff Cathedral in the same year. In 1923 he became Chancellor of Llandaff Cathedral and in 1926 Dean. A son, Francis Worsley, who died some years ago, wrote the scripts for the Tommy Handley radio show, ITMA.’ (16)
 
Cuthbert, like his father, feels the boredom of his profession and wants adventure and time to write (he had several poems and articles published in various periodicals and papers), and so, aged 26 and feeling alone, he left Wellington College and became a private tutor. With the beginnings of a novel he is enticed to Gordonstoun school for a term by its Headmaster (and founder in 1934), Kurt Hahn to give a report on conditions and teaching practices there while working on his novel and playing a little cricket which sounds idyllic – the report is not favourable to Hahn and the comic scene of books being thrown at each others heads ensues. The novel is abandoned and discarded and through his friendship with the poet Stephen Spender they go to Spain in 1937 and during the Civil War works as part of an ambulance unit; in the second World War he joins the RAF and finds it all ‘drill and bull’ before suffering a nervous breakdown and being discharged; he eventually finds his place among the staff of the New Statesman. He knew some fascinating people during his lifetime: Cyril Connolly, who introduced Cuthbert to Enid Bagnold (Cuthbert and his partner, John Anthony Luscombe, lived four years at Bagnold’s 19^th century ‘ravishing little cottage’ in Rottingdean; John and Cuthy used to visit Sir Laurence Olivier in Brighton), John Lehmann, W. H. Auden (they published ‘Education Today and Tomorrow’ together in 1939) and poet Gavin Ewart, who was a pupil of his. Cuthbert wrote several works under the name T. C. Worsley, such as ‘Behind the Battle’ (1939), ‘The Fugitive Art: Dramatic Commentaries 1947-1951’ (1952), ‘Television: The Ephemeral Art’ (1970) and ‘Fellow Travellers’ (1971). He became ill with emphysema in 1964 and had to retire due to ill health in 1972; in increasing pain, he too an overdose at his home in Brighton on 23^rd February 1977. He lived a very varied and interesting life, yet Cuthbert seems to have been haunted by the ghost of his younger brother, Richard, who died before the promise of a successful life was fulfilled; perhaps Cuthbert left this life with the image of young ‘Bengy’, the dancing faun, still clinging to him just before he tore himself away and left him to the waves!
 
 
 
NOTES:
 
1. Francis Frederick Worsley, born 2^nd June 1902, Kensington, London. He was educated at Brighton College and Balliol College, Oxford. A fine cricket player he played for Cardiff Cricket Club; he married Alice D. Eaves in Cardiff in 1930 and he was a well-known radio producer for the BBC, joining the BBC in Cardiff in 1928. He is much remembered for his ‘ITMA’ (It’s That Man Again) radio show which ran from 1939-49. Francis died on Thursday 15^th September 1949 at Mile End Hospital, London, he was 47 years old and was survived by a wife and son. Mary Elizabeth Worsley, born 1904, Kensington, London. Mary, known as ‘Betty’, taught ballroom and ballet and was secretary (with Miss Christine Wheatley) of the Llandaff School of Dancing in Cardiff, circa 1927-1935. On Friday 22^nd February 1935 the BBC aired a ‘Programme of Old Fashioned Dances’ at 8.15 p.m. given by The Llandaff School of Dancing arranged by Betty Worsley and Christine Wheatley with the Western Studio Orchestra, leader Frank Thomas. The programme devised and produced by John N. Lampson. William Lister Worsley, born 18^th July 1906, Lincolnshire. Attended Brighton College. Married Olwen Stuart, 30^th April 1934 (daughter Priscilla born Greenwich, 1939). Olwen died in Amersham in1947 aged 45. William married for a second time on 1^st October 1949 in Kensington, London to actress Beryl Reid (1919-1996) [the wedding was postponed for two weeks due to the death of Francis in September 1949] The marriage broke up in 1953. William, ‘Bill’, worked as a radio producer for the BBC and is best known for ‘Workers’ Playtime’ which ran from 1941-1964. Bill Worsley died in London in 1976. Thomas Cuthbert Worsley (1907-1977) and Richard Geoffrey Worsley, born  20^th August 1912, died 15^th July 1928.
2. Flannelled Fool: A Slice of Life in the Thirties. 1967 (1985 ed.).  T. C. Worsley. p. 41.
3. ibid. p. 56.
4. ibid. p. 141.
5. ibid. p75-76.
6. ibid. p. 108.
7. ibid. p. 89.
8. Edouard Espinosa (1871-1950). British ballet dancer and teacher.
9. Flannelled Fool.  p. 108.
10. ibid. p. 109.
11. ibid. p. 108.
12. ibid. p. 110.
13. ibid. p. 111.
14. Western Mail. Tuesday 17^th July 1928. p. 10.
15. Flannelled Fool. p. 138-9.
16. The Western Mail and South Wales News. Thursday 1^st March 1956. p. 5.

RAYMOND HEYWOOD

 

 

LOOKING FOR RAYMOND
THE SOLDIER-POET OF REMEMBRANCE
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
 

‘Have you seen the rose trees
And the hedgerows white with may,
In the early morning breeze
By the Thames down Marlowe way?
 
Have you seen the sunset quiver
As it sinks behind the ridge,
When the shadows on the river
Softly fall by Cookham Bridge?
 
Lilac trees fade out of sight,
There is magic in the moon,
Stars come out to greet the night, -
Night of roses: June, sweet June.’ (1)

 

Upon discovering the poetry of the soldier-poet, Lieutenant Raymond Heywood of the Devonshire Regiment, I decided to learn more about this lesser-known and elusive writer of poems of remembrance whose verse celebrates the brave souls that gave their lives during the Great War and sings of his deep devotion and love for Devon. But what do we actually know about Raymond Heywood? We know that he proclaims to have served with the Devonshire Regiment as a Lieutenant; we certainly know that he survived the First World War and that his poetry appeared in many periodicals (2) and newspapers and that he published two volumes of verse: ‘Roses, Pearls and Tears’ (Erskine Macdonald. London. 1918) and ‘The Greater Love’ (Elkin Mathews. London. 1919); both books gathered favourable reviews from various newspapers and literary periodicals, and with no other line of evidence to pursue the reviews make an obvious choice, such as this from The Western Times of June 1918: ‘An officer of the Devon Regt., Lieut. Raymond Heywood, has published, through Erskine Macdonald, a collection of poems under the title of “Roses, Pearls, and Tears”. The verses were mostly written in the trenches of France and the East while Lieut. Heywood was serving with the Devons, and are aptly described as “a treasury of remembrance to all who have known the sadness and sacrifices of war.” It is interesting to know that one of Devon’s own regiment has joined the ranks – already imposing ranks – of our soldier poets.’ (3) It seems the author of the article conveniently forgot about Lieutenant William Noel Hodgson, M.C. (born 1893 in Gloucestershire, educated Durham School and Christ Church, Oxford) the poet who wrote under the pen-name, Edward Melbourne and served with the 9^th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment at the Battle of Loos (25^th September 1915) and sadly died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, near Mametz on 1^st July 1916, aged just 23! It also makes me think that had Heywood died we would probably know more about him, but perhaps the reviews will reveal something? In The Tatler of July 1918 we find: ‘Have you added yet to your poems shelf “Roses, Pearls, and Tears,” by Lieutenant Raymond Heywood of the Devonshire Regiment? The writer has charmingly sent a copy:- To Eve with the author’s grateful thanks for happy hours spent reading the “Letters,” and it is a duty as well as a pleasure to get the book because he is devoting half the proceeds to helping the poorer women-folk left by the men of his company who have fallen. “You know, Eve, how splendid these boys were, meeting death with laughter on their lips and the love of home in their hearts.” I quote from one called “Pals O’ Mine”:-

 
Morning came –
Out of its golden mist I heard
Laughter and the echoed tramp
Of a thousand laughing lads.
 
Behind the lonely hill
The sun sank crimson… through the trees
The night wind softly stirred
And all was still.
 
… But I shall hear
When morning comes in a golden mist,
The echoed song from the thousand lips
Of those dear laughing lads.’ (4)

 

So far there is very little new knowledge concerning Heywood but we must continue the search – I found this from The Globe, of May 1919: ‘Mr. Raymond Heywood’s poems of remembrance, “The Greater Love” (Elkin Mathews. 2s. 6d.), breathe a sweet love of the homeland “down Devon way,” for he was a Lieutenant in the Devon Regiment.

 
Tell me – do the roses blow
In the lanes down Devon way,
Are the orchards all aglow
And the hedgerows bright with May?
 
Tell me – are the skies of Devon
Just as blue as blue can be,
Is there still a peep in heaven
In the blue of Devon’s sea.
 
Yes, my laddie, skies are blue,
And it helps to ease the pain,
While my heart is calling you
Back to Devon and love again.’ (5)

 

And as another example this from The Devon and Exeter Gazette which mistakenly (or perhaps not) gives Heywood’s rank as ‘Captain’ – ‘Captain Raymond Heywood of the Devonshire Regiment, whose little volume of verses “Roses, Pearls, and Tears,” was noticed in these columns some short time since, has favoured us with a copy of “The Greater Love”, poems of remembrance which he has dedicated “To all who have loved and lost, yet – keeping the love in their hearts – can smile back into the eyes of God, and understand.” As in his previous volume, the contents of  “The Greater Love” are particularly meant to appeal to Devon folk, and we are sure they will carry their message of comfort and consolation to many, re-echoing the sentiments in the hearts of those who are able to express themselves as Captain Heywood does in “Things I Love”:-

 
“The fragrance of a lilac tree in May,
The crimson of a sunset o’er the bay,
The peace of twilight time down Devon way.
 
The golden radiance of a harvest moon,
The call to prayer of village bells at noon,
The falling petals of a rose in June.
 
The heather-perfumed breeze upon the moor,
The echo of sad waves upon the shore,
These things I love – and, ah, a thousand more.”

 

The publishers are Messrs Elkin Mathews (Cork-Street, London). (6)

 

Unlike many other soldier-poets with their patriotic bluster, Raymond Heywood has a very subtle, almost feminine touch to his poetry with an ever present tone of melancholy, much as one finds in the poetry of A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy; it is evident in poems such as ‘Rose Leaves’, from Roses, Pearls, and Tears:

 
I did not know so soon would end the day
In which the roses bloomed – scarce had they found
The sun’s caresses, when they died away,
And shed their withered petals on the ground.
 
I did not know that when you had to go,
The sunshine with the roses would depart –
But you’ll come back to me one day, and so
I’ll keep the rose-leaves fragrant in my heart. (7)

 

And the almost haunting, ‘Down Devon Way’, also from Roses, Pearls, and Tears, which speaks of the turmoil of change, beginning with the poet accompanied by his lover or companion and ending in solitude, searching for peace:

 
It seems that only yesterday
We listened to the blackbird’s song.
The roses bloomed down Devon way,
Our hopes were high and love was strong;
The joy of living filled my heart
(Oh, that such joy can never stay!)
We made a little world apart,
For hearts are true down Devon way.
 
I know that when the blackbird’s song
In sweetest silence died away,
The nights grew very sad and long,
But hearts are loyal down Devon way,
We lost our little world apart –
It seemed the joy was only lent –
But there’s a memory in my heart
That lingered when the roses went.
 
I think that when the roses blow
Down Devon way I’ll go again
To some dear, quiet place I know,
And hear the blackbird’s sweet refrain:
There, when the western shadows fall
Around my world at close of day,
My heart will understand it all,
And find sweet peace down Devon way. (8)

 

Heywood’s Christian sentiments and sympathy for those men lost to the war and for the loved ones left to cope with the loss runs throughout his poetry and one can sense the deep sadness he feels, at times it seems as a ‘motherly love’ for the soldiers in his care, the ‘doomed youth’ that the war will eradicate physically, in lines such as ‘My son, / How sweet the day, / Before you went away! / The red, red roses bloomed, and I was glad. / You filled my mother-heart, dear Tommy lad.’ The poem continues with deeper tenderness – ‘”For Valour,” / A little cross, / To compensate my loss; / Crushed are the roses’ petals, crimson red, / Time does not matter now. My boy is dead.’ The poem ends with the same ‘understanding’ the poet seems to find in ‘Down Devon Way’: ‘With mother lips, upon my cross / In tenderness / A loving kiss I press. / And as I touch it with my caring hand, / New things of heaven and earth I understand.’ [Son. Roses, Pearls and Tears] The same ‘motherly-love’ can be found in the following poem, which some may say indicates the poet’s sexuality:

 
‘O Boy o’ Mine, beneath the rose –hued skies,
Of other days I see your face again;
Life only leaves me tender memories,
And dear dead dreams that fill my heart with pain.
 
O boy o’ mine, how could I let you go, -
All that I held so dear: Nothing can tell
Of all you were to me – I only know
That when you went the evening shadows fell.
 
O boy o’ mine, the joy was only lent,
And you have nobly played a hero’s part,
Thro’ the dark night to your dear grave is sent
A Mother’s love, from my poor aching heart.’
 
[My Boy. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Just why the poet chooses a ‘mother’s role’ is difficult to say but the concern and the regret and the promise that they shall be remembered remains as a firm testament –

 
REMEMBRANCE
(“To live in hearts we love is not to die.”)
 
A myriad souls that have the sweetness pressed
From youth and love and life,
From Flanders’ fields have gone to seek their rest
Beyond the pain and strife.
 
Youth said to Love: “The soldier’s soul is mine,
‘Twas I who brought
His spirit all the fire and strength divine,
That nobly fought.”
 
Love answered: “While they claim I will confess –
My inspiration gives
Such splendid lives the noble tenderness
Whereby their memory lives.” (9)

 

The strength of this promise to remember is given in his dedication in ‘Roses, Pearls and Tears’ to ‘The Women of the Empire and those of their splendid Men who have fallen and to all who have known the discipline of Pain and Sorrow’ –

 

‘Oh, that it were within my power to stay the hand

Of pain and death – the bitter waste of years;

But what is time and life? – when in God’s better land

Love lies beyond our Roses, Pearls, and Tears.’

 

The poet has seen the ‘splendid men’ fall in battle; he has known great friendship and great minds fall to the war machine and the promise to remember them is fulfilled by his devoting half the proceeds from the volume to the poor ‘women-folk’ left to grieve. He explains his wishes in a letter to the Devon and Exeter Gazette in September 1919: ‘The Greater Love. To the Editor of the Daily Gazette. Sir, - Under the patronage of Princess Christian, Veterans’ Day is to be held on the last day of this month. The object is to create an Imperial memorial scheme to our war heroes. It is to take the form of a Club house, with 1,000 beds, and every convenience for serving and ex-Service men, also Convalescent Homes for those still requiring treatment and after-care. In order to help this scheme I am publishing a special edition of Remembrance Poems, entitled “The Greater Love”, and for each copy sold I will double my royalty in aid of this fund. Copies will be sent post free for 2s 6d net to any address, and the help of your readers will be gratefully appreciated. Yours truly, Raymond Heywood Lieut. Devonshire Regiment. 10, Buckingham Street, Adelphi, London, W.C.2.’ (10)

 

We know also that he served in France and Macedonia as many of the poems in ‘Roses, Pearls and Tears’ were written in the trenches (11) and give specific locations such as ‘A Soldier Sleeping’ – ‘Tread softly there! On the ground / Rifle and bayonet forgotten lie! / Tommy lad is resting. See his lips / Are smiling – dreams have come / On rose-tipped wings!’ written at Neuve Chapelle on 12^th March 1915 and ‘The First Wave’ which begins dreamily, ‘Falling leaves and setting sun, / Ending of another day; / Down the trench the echoes run, / O’er the top and far away!’ and goes on to describe the ‘eager faces’ and ‘anxious eyes’ as ‘through the fire of hell they run’, blurred figures from the past whom Heywood would have known as comrades, as ‘swiftly through the wire they pass, / silent faces, one by one; / some will sleep upon the grass - / falling leaves and setting sun.’ written at Givenchy in the Autumn of 1915; ‘In Thessaly’ written in Greece during Christmas 1916 and the elegiac ‘Rest and Quietness’ written in Macedonia on 10^th February 1917, a night that was definitely not quiet and restful for the Devonshire Regiment:*

 
‘If I should die
Be my last thoughts of Devon –
Of early morning
And quiet nights,
To see the woods in Autumn, the green of fields,
The blue of Summer skies and bluer sea;
To hear the song of birds, the rippling streams,
The swish of waves against the big grey rocks;
To smell the rich brown earth – the wild flowers
In the lanes – the ripening fruit…’

 

And the contemplative ‘The Discipline of Sorrow’ where the poet has ‘seen the silver moonbeams gently play / o’er Macedonia’s hills at dead of night’ and seen ‘the Eastern stars play hide and seek / on Doiran’s lovely lake of azure blue’ and can only conclude that ‘maybe, one day, when Time has eased the pain, / at last I’ll see / God’s own good reason for these latter years!’ which was written by Lake Doiran, Serbia in 1917, so we can see a pattern of movement and we know that the Devonshire Regiment served in Macedonia, specifically the 10^th Battalion and therefore the poet, Raymond Heywood must inevitably belong to the 10^th Devonshire’s. With this in mind I researched the officers of the Devonshire Regiment for the period of the war; particularly the 10^th Service Battalion but found no officer named Raymond Heywood, I even looked through the lists of chaplains of various denominations but no-one named Raymond Heywood. I can only gather that ‘Raymond Heywood’ is a pseudonym, in fact many poets chose to use a ‘pen-name’ and I am convinced of this; for some reason the poet wanted to remain anonymous; but he was still a soldier and served, presumably as an office, in the Devonshire Regiment and certain factors still remain: 1. he survived the war and his identity may possibly be revealed through investigating a list of officers from the 10^th Devons who survived the war, and, 2. his love of Devon suggests he was probably born there or had some deep attachment to the county which may narrow down the search.

 
PRO PATRIA MORI
 
The shadows softly fall where they are sleeping,
The moonbeams dance
Upon their beds, and they are in God’s keeping –
Somewhere in France.
 
Upon their graves the crimson poppies glory,
And cornflowers too,
White lilies to complete the floral story –
Red, white and blue,
 
For that they died… no clarion calls were blended,
No lifted lance
For each small share, - but just a journey ended –
Somewhere in France. (12)

 

The 10^th Service Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment was formed at Topsham Barracks in Exeter on 24^th September 1914; training began when they were posted to Stockton Camp, Codford St. Mary, Salisbury Plain as part of the 79^th Infantry Brigade of the 26^th Division. During November the weather was too cold to sleep in tents and so better accommodation was found for the men in Bath.

 

A list of officers for the 10^th Service Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment given in the Monthly Army List for December 1914 appears as:

Captains: K. A. Brown. L. F. [Lewis Frederick] Adams. Lieutenant: F. Bryce. 2^nd Lieutenants: O. Lovett. J. B. Passmore. H. G. Wimbush. H. W. H. Creasy. G. R. Bennett. D. H. Bellamy. B. R. Dunning. C. Greenslade. M. W. A. MacMichael. W. R. F. Miller. W. T. A. Bazalgette. A. [Andrew] Napier. J. [John] Ost. R. W. Townsend. N. Greenslade. H. D. H. Court. F. Colwin. E. J. G. Mudge. W. I. Partridge.

 

And for March 1915: Command: Lt. Col. G. J. [George John] Ellicombe (1859-1946). Majors: F. M. [Francis Marwood] Hext. R. P. Smith. N. Z. [Norman Zeal] Emerson. Captains: H. R. [Henry Reginald] Chomondeley (1862-1947). K. A. Brown. A. MacN. Martin. A. Fletcher. C. K. Martin. Lieutenants: H. G. Wimbush. O. Lovett. J. B. Passmore. C. Greenslade. G. R. Bennett. B. R. Dunning. H. W. H. Creasy. 2^nd Lieutenants: E. F. Lyons. F. W. Moore. D. H. Bellamy. M. W. A. MacMichael. W. R. F. Miller. W. T. A. Bazalgette. A. Napier. J. Ost. R. W. Townsend. N. Greenslade. H. D. H. Court. F. Colwin. E. J. G. Mudge. W. I. Partridge. C. F. C. Featherstonhaugh. D. M. Murdoch. A. H. Peck. A. [Andrew] Fowle. L. F. Vinicombe. W. T. Beer. H. F. Clark. H. Diggines. J. B. S. Notley. G. Litchfield. S. H. Duff. S. J. Cottle. C. G. Harris. H. S. Adams. A. D. S. Catling. N. G. Easton. J. de M. Dunster. L. J. Moon. G. A. Williams. E. H. Taylor. G. E. Morrison. A. B. Cadell. C. A. Campbell. R. Weymouth-Wilson. G. B. C. Northey. G. D. Lock. W. G. Lock.

 

The Regiment left Bath to crowds of cheering and waving on 20^th April 1915 and marched the 21 miles to Sutton Veny, a camp near Warminster where further training would be given; the 10^th Devons were at the camp with the 7^th Wiltshire Regiment, the 12^th Hampshire Regiment and the 8^th Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry. They were sent to France on 22^nd September 1915, landing at Boulogne.

On the 30^th October 1915 the 26^th Division which included the 10^th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment were diverted from France to Greece; they departed at the port of Marseilles and landed at the port of Salonika; they arrived in Salonika on 21^st November 1915. The 10^th Devons were stationed at Lembet Camp which is about three miles north of Salonika. Once there they surrounded their trench system with wire which came to be known as ‘the birdcage’. In July 1916 the 10^th Devons were ordered to advance north to the front line on the Greek/Bulgarian border, this was done over almost a week of night marching. They settled at Kalinova, a place south of Doiran. On 25^th October 1916 they marched about eight miles east towards the hill, ‘La Tortue’ (The Tortoise), situated across a ravine from the fortified hilltop, Petit Couronne, on the Bulgarian front line, to relieve the French. They were to remain there for six months and malaria and dysentery caused a lot of sickness in the battalion.

 

In November 1916 the Battalion consisted of: 2^nd in Command: H. R. Cholmondeley. Captains: K. A. Brown. A. MacN. Martin. L. F. Adams. A. Fletcher. C. K. Martin. C. Greenslade. Lieutenants: O. Lovett. J. B. Passmore. G. R. Bennett. B. R. Dunning. A. H. Peck.  D. H. Bellamy. E. F. Lyons. F. W. Moore. W. R. F. Miller. 2^nd Lieutenants: W. H. [William Henry] Hornby. J. Ost. R. W. Townsend. N. Greenslade. W. I. Partridge. J. N. Herapath. A. Fowle. H. Diggines. H. S. Adams. L. J. Moon. E. H. Taylor. W. E. A. Hitchcock. G. B. C. Northey. C. D. Webber. H. Goad. J. T. J. Hollom.

 

On Christmas Day 1916 the men of the 10^th Battalion enjoyed a traditional Christmas Dinner of turkey, roast beef and Christmas pudding and it was during this time that Heywood would write – ‘In Thessaly’: ‘In Thessaly I see the light / Of twilight time, when comes the night / With charm and grace, / But somewhere o’er the Western Sea / A fairer thing I long to see, / One woman’s face.’ (In Thessaly. Roses, Pearls, and Tears)

 

A raid was planned for the 9^th February 1917 but a terrible snow blizzard caused it to be delayed until the following day, the 10^th February 1917; the Devonshires made a trench raid on Petit Couronne and after two hours of fierce fighting with over thirty casualties and around a hundred wounded they were forced to withdraw.

 

February 1917: Major: K. A. Brown. Captains: A. Fletcher (Lt. Canadian Military Forces). C. K. Martin. C. Greenslade. J. B. Passmore. O. Lovett. E. F. Lieutenants: G. R. Bennett. B. R. Dunning. D. H. Bellamy. E. F. Lyons. F. W. Moore (Adjutant). W. R. F. Miller. R. W. Townsend. W. H. Hornby. 2^nd Lieutenants: J. Ost. N. Greenslade. W. I. Partridge. J. N. Herapath. A. Fowle. H. Diggines. H. S. Adams. E. H. Taylor. W. E. A. Hitchcock. G. B. C. Northey. C. D. Webber. H. Goad. J. T. J. Hollom. G. E. S. Montagu. S. J. H. Smith. Quarter Master: F. L. P. Rosini.

 

On 23^rd April 1917 there was a heavy bombardment and lots of wire cutting for on the following day, 24^th April 1917, another night raid was scheduled, zero hour being 9.45 p.m. The Devons managed to get through the wire but were ordered to retreat; this would be known as the first Battle of Doiran.

On 26^th April the Battalion marched eight miles east of Doiran to a new position at Dova Tepe, a sector on the slopes of the Krusha Balkan hills. The Devons held the line for the remainder of 1917 until the spring and summer of 1918.

 

May 1918: Command: Major K. A. Brown, D.S.O. Captain: H. C. Ponsonby. J. B. Passmore. E. F. Lyons. B. R. Dunning. R. W. Townsend. Lieutenants: K. C. Nichols. F. W. Charlesworth. N. Greenslade. H. Goad. J. N. Herapath. A. Fowle. S. Wright-Smith. G. B. C. Northey. F. W. [Frederick William] Cornell. 2^nd Lieutenants: W. E. A. Hitchcock. R. E. Carpenter. H. [Howard] Mercer (Adjutant). F. W. [Frederick William] Deacon. R. G. Jefferson. Quarter Master: J. H. Simpson (Hon Lt.).

 
EVENTIDE AT YPRES
 
A solemn stillness fills the air,
The shadows long and longer grow;
Broad sunbeams lie across the square,
Where soldiers come and go;
Round ruined tower stray swallows glide
And slowly, slowly sinks the sun
At Ypres – when the day is done.
 
No more the shattered trees resound
With song of many a happy bird;
But far beyond the fire-swept ground
The crashing guns are heard!
And yet sometimes like whispers sighed
Soft breezes through those tree-tops run
At Ypres – when the day is done.
 
So may the lives so nobly spent,
When sunset greets their dying eyes,
Find in their hearts a sweet content
Instilled by sacrifice.
For many hero-spirits glide
To realms of rest – the journey run
At Ypres – when the day is done.
 
[Eventide at Ypres. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

On 14^th September 1918 the allied offensive began. By the 18^th September the Serbs had taken Doiran and Petit Couranne had fallen. The Bulgarians had retreated by 20^th September and the Devons crossed into Bulgaria on 28^th September; the Bulgarian forces surrendered on 29^th September and hostilities ceased at noon; the following day, 30^th September the Bulgarians officially surrendered from the war but Turkey still remained! On 1^st December 1918 the 10^th Devons marched through Bucharest.

 

September 1919: Majors: K. A. Brown. J. B. Passmore. Captains: A. MacN. Martin. E. F. Lyons. B. R. Dunning. R. W. Townsend. S. Wright-Smith. F. W. Charlesworth. A. S. Robinson. Lieutenants: H. Goad. J. N. Herapath. P. G. Whitehouse. G. B. C. Northey. P. H. Thomson. F. W. Deacon. F. W. Cornell. H. T. Marshall. R. G. Jefferson. 2^nd Lieutenants: C. H. Cosway. H. V. Gibbons. J. H. Simpson.

 

BEFORE BATTLE
 
I heard them sing of home last night,
A song of Devon they loved so well,
As they were marching to the fight –
Along the Flanders road to hell…
 
I scarce can think ‘twas yesterday
Those laughing lads could laugh and sing,
For now their dear boy lips are grey,
And Devon has made her offering.
 
Their song is dead, but that sweet strain
Still gathering charms unknown before,
Will make a music in my brain,
And haunt my heart for evermore.
 
[from The Greater Love]

 

The following is a list of fellow officers of the 10^th Battalion whom ‘Heywood’ would have probably known, men who sadly fell in battle:

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Owen Lovett, born 1895, Fulham, London, son of Charles Joshua Lovett (Oilman Dealer) and Jane Douglas of 68 Badminton Road, Balham, London. He died on 25^th April 1917, aged 22 and is buried at Doiran, Greece.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Harry William Hay Creasy, born circa 1896 in Colombo, Ceylon, son of Harry Creasy and Louise Hay. Educated at St Bees School, Cumberland (1911-1913) and Berkhamstead School, Hertfordshire; he also served with the 11^th Battalion, Essex Regiment. He died on 13^th June 1916 and is buried at Essex Farm Cemetery, Belgium.

 

Lieutenant William Thomas Arnold Bazalgette, born June 1897, Epsom, Surrey, son of Major John Evelyn Bazalgette (1870-1951) and Mabel Constance Brooking (1872-1927). Educated at Blundell’s School, Tiverton, Devon; he died in Flanders on 9^th May 1917 aged 20 (there is no grave, his name appears on the Menin Gate, Ypres).

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) David Humphrey Bellamy, born 1895, India, Ceylon, son of Lt. Col. Charles Vincent Bellamy, D.S.O. and Ellen Hawkins of ‘Leigh Holt’, Crapstone, Yelverton, Devon. He served with the 9^th and 10^th Devons in France and Salonika, and died on 2^nd April 1917 aged 22; he is buried at H. A. C. Cemetery, Ecoust-St. Mein, France.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Francis William Moore, M.C., born c. 1890, son of Richard and Mary Moore, 61 Highbury New Park, Highbury, London. Francis was a member of the Kensington Rowing Club and served with the 8^th and 10^th Devonshires (‘B’ Company); he died on 26^th April 1917 aged 27 and is buried at Sarigol Military Cemetery, Kriston, Greece.

 
‘Beneath the moon, grief pale, I clasp his hand,
And for a quiet while I bend above him and his tired smile
Will linger in my heart until the end…
O God! ‘tis only they who loved a friend can understand.’
 
[My Pal. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Lieutenant Sidney Joseph Cottle, born 27^th January 1895, Calcutta, India, son of John and Adela Cottle of Devon. Sidney served as a private in the Royal Fusiliers; 2^nd Lieutenant in the Machine Gun Corps; Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment and also ‘A’ Battalion of the Tank Corps. He died on 31^st July 1917 aged 22 and is buried at Birr Cross Roads Cemetery, Belgium.

 

Lieutenant Michael William Annesley MacMichael, born 1895, Lee, Ilfracombe, Devon, son of Rev. William Fisher MacMichael and Mary Elizabeth Fisher of ‘Old House’, Tiverton, Devon. He also served with 11^th Battalion, Essex Regiment (A Company) and died on 16^th September 1916 aged 21; he is buried at La Neuville British Cemetery, Corbie, France.

 

Lieutenant William Reginald Francis Miller, born 1897, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire; son of Hubert William Miller and Amy B. Dulley of 4, The Beacon, Exmouth; he died between 24^th and 25^th April 1917 aged 20, and is buried at Doiran, Greece.

 
‘I only want to find a quiet place,
Within a garden, where a heart is yearning;
I only want to see one woman’s face,
And find the love-light in her dear eyes burning.
 
I only know what joy ‘twill be to feel
That from her side again I need not roam;
When I come back, at close of day, I’ll kneel,
And thank my God for bringing me back home.’
 
[My Wish. Raymond Heywood. Malta. Summer 1917. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Lieutenant Wilfred Issell Partridge, born 18^th May 1893 in Heavitree, Devon, son of Richard Issell Partridge (Schoolmaster) and Laura Sarah Jane Mugford of 6 St John’s Road, Exeter, Devon. Wilfred was educated at Hele’s School and King’s College, London. He died 24^th April 1917 aged 25 and is buried at Doiran, Greece.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Leonard James Moon, born 9^th February 1878, Kensington, London, son of William Moon (solicitor) and Sarah A. Moon. He was educated at Westminster School (1891-1896) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (1897-1900) before becoming a schoolmaster and Headmaster; a renowned cricketer who played for Middlesex County Cricket Club (1899-1909). His cause of death states ‘died of wounds’ but Moon, suffering the trauma of shell-shock committed suicide by shooting himself on 23^rd November 1916, near Salonika. He was 38 years old and he is buried at Karasouli Military Cemetery in Salonika, Greece.

 
‘He was a man… I linger where his cross
Shines white among the shadows, and I know
My very soul is strengthened by my loss.
My comrade still in death – I loved him so.’
 
[A Man’s Man (To ….. killed in action). Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

2^nd Lieutenant Edward Stanley Hudson, born 20^th October 1892, Stroud, Gloucestershire, son of Rev. Edward Francis William Hudson of Saunton, Devon, and Constance Lyla Carver; by all accounts a fine pianist and well-liked young man, educated at Victoria College (1906-1911) and Exeter College, Oxford (Modern Languages) until 1914 when he entered the Royal Fusiliers before his commission in 1915 to the 10^th Devonshires; in November 1916 he served in Egypt and Salonika. He died 13th February 1917, aged 24 and he is buried at Sarigol Military Cemetery, Greece.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Sydney John Howard Smith, born 1888, Wandsworth, London, son of Arthur Nixon Smith (Tobacconist/Confectioner and Solicitor) and Mary Ann Rebecca Day. Sydney entered service as a private in the Royal Fusilers and became a 2^nd Lieutenant 10^th Devonshires. He died 10^th February 1917 and is buried at Doiran, Greece.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Assheton Biddulph Cadell, born 1894, Tiverton, Devon, son of Nevil Pottow Cadell and Gertrude Louisa Biddulph of ‘Foxlease’, Camberley, Surrey. Cadell also served with the 8^th Battalion, Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment). He died at Ypres on 19^th February 1916, aged 21 and he is buried at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium.

 
‘The moonlight softly fell upon your bed,
(O God, I scarce can think that you are dead!)
And all my heart, and all the dreams I knew
I dreamed I saw a little cross of white,
A little lonely mound, so still and grey –
I only heard the sighing poplars sway.’
 
[By Sanctuary Wood. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

2^nd Lieutenant Lionel Frank Vinicombe, born 1887 in Constantinople, son of  Charles and Louisa Vinicombe, of Constantinople (and 36 Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge). He was educated at George Watson’s College, Edinburgh (1900-1905) and King’s College, London (1907) at the Faculty of Science (Analytical Chemist) before going to the National Gymnasium in Stockholm. He enlisted in the 10^th Devonshires in December 1914 and transferred to the 8^th Battalion, Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment) in November 1915. He died on 29^th June 1916, aged 29 and he is buried at Dranoutre Military Cemetery, Belgium.

 
TO THE DEAD
 
Ah, how can we forget you? – you who stood
For right, and brought us Freedom with your blood –
Saving a nation’s soul; your heads held high –
Thinking it fine to fight, and finer still to die
For England’s sake!...
 
Ah, we shall not forget you, come what may
With the glad dawning of each new-born day
Remembrance still shall live from age to age
For you, our best, our dearest – England’s pride,
Who, having died
For all that Justice stands for, side by side –
Gave up your lives to God, and paved the way –
That we might come into our heritage! (13)

 

 

Some of the officers who served with the 10^th Devonshire Regiment and survived are listed below which may provide a clue as to the identity of Raymond Heywood:

 

Major Kenneth Arundel Brown, born 2^nd February 1890, St. Thomas, Devon, son of William Henry Brown, born 1866 (house decorator/restaurant waiter) and Emily S. Brown. Kenneth was educated at the Guildhall School of Music, becoming organist of St. Peter’s Church and Director of the Wimbledon Choral Society. He lived in St. Leonard’s and died in Hastings in 1980.

 

Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Francis Marwood Hext, born 14^th January 1860, Trenarren House, St. Austell, Cornwall, son of Thomas Hext (1805-1881) and Rhoda Charlton Yeatman (1819-1914). He married Florence Petherick (1868-1922) on 17^th June 1893; he was also High Sheriff of Devon in 1933. He died on 21^st December 1944 at St. German’s Lodge, Exeter, Devon.

 

Captain Archibald McNeil Martin, born 1870, Blackheath, London; he married Anne Carter Hampson at Ormskirk, Lancashire on 30^th August 1893. Their son Captain Cecil Hampson Martin (born 8^th June 1894, India) of the East Lancashire Regiment died in France on 2^nd October 1916. Captain Archibald MacNeil Martin died on 19^th April 1922, Plymouth, Devon and was buried on 22^nd April in Broadstone, Devon.

 

Captain (later Colonel) Henry Chambre Ponsonby, D.S.O., M.C., born 8^th April 1883, Ireland, son of Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby, M.P. and Mary Plunkett. Henry married Beatrice Maud Cecil Levinge in July 1923. He died on 2^nd January 1953 in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

 

Captain (later Major) Ashton Fletcher, born Arthur Guy Ashton Fletcher, M.D., C.M., 15^th January 1870, Toronto, Canada. He married Eleanor Beatrice Forbes, 27^th November 1899, Massachusetts, United States (and later Loretta Luella King, post 1914). Ashton was a General Practitioner before joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914; commission to Lieutenant (4^th Battalion); Captain in the 10^th Devonshires and Major in the R.A.M.C. He published a paper ‘Creosote in Pneumonia’ in the British Medical Journal (28^th June 1919. p. 799) while an acting Major (temporary commission) with the R.A.M.C. He died 2^nd March 1933 in Toronto, Canada.

 

Captain Claude Kennedy Martin, born 1873, Coorg, South India, youngest son of Major G. M. Martin, Indian Army. Claude married Madeline Annie Desborough (born 15^th October 1872 Plumstead, Surrey) at Northam in Devon on 19^th April 1904. In 1911 they are living in Cranford Magna, Dorset and Claude is a ‘retired coffee planter). He died on 26^th October 1937.

 

Captain (later Major) Ernest Frederick Lyons, M.C., born 12^th July 1890, India. In 1901 11 year old schoolboy, Ernest, born in ‘India Ragportana’ is boarding in East Preston, Littlehampton, Sussex. Ernest worked as a clerk at Baring Brothers and Co. Ltd. London in 1906 and his address was 124 Fellows Road, Hampstead, London. In 1911 he is 21, single and a ‘bank clerk’ boarding with the Greening family in Lewisham (possibly a friend of Reginald Walter Greening, a civil servant second class clerk in the India Office who is the same age as Ernest). E. F. Lyons served as a 2^nd Lieutenant with the 8^th Service Battalion, Devonshire Regiment in October 1914 (as was fellow officer 2^nd Lieutenant Francis William Moore) and was transferred to the 10^th Battalion as he appears in the February 1915 Army List as a Lieutenant with the 10^th Devonshires (F. W. Moore was also transferred to the 10^th; he died during the first Battle of Doiran on 26^th April 1917). In April 1917 Lyons was wounded and hospitalised. He was awarded the M.C. on 1^st January 1919. In the Army List for June 1929 Captain Ernest Frederick Lyons is serving with the 1^st and 2^nd Battalion (Regular) of the Middlesex Regiment (small arms school). On 14^th September 1933 Army Officer Captain Ernest Frederick Lyons aged 43 travels from London to Port Said, Egypt on board the ‘Barrabool’. However, Captain Lyons did return to England and there is some mystery surrounding his death as the following article from The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph (14) describes: ‘Major’s Fatal Fall by Land’s End – an open verdict. How a man saw another man fall, sustaining injuries which proved fatal, and then went away, and could not be traced was told to the Deputy Borough Coroner (Mr. Barrie Bennetts) at Penzance on Thursday afternoon, when he held an inquest on Major Ernest Frederick Lyons staying at No Place, Sennen, who died at the West Cornwall Hospital on Tuesday morning as the result of injuries received in a fall at the Land’s End the previous afternoon.’ The article goes on to say that ‘evidence of identification was given by Mr. Gaston Chameroy (15), of No Place, Sennen, who said that deceased was a retired Major who had served with the Middlesex Regiment. He had known deceased since the latter was a boy, and for the last three months deceased had been staying at his house. Deceased was a bachelor aged fifty-one, and his home address was “Oakway”, Alford, near Cranleigh, Surrey.’ We are then told that ‘Major Lyons enjoyed fair health’ and ‘had no financial or other worries’ and had been ‘seeking another post’. The witness, Mr. Chameroy last saw the Major alive on Monday lunch time; the Major went out for a walk about 2.20 p.m. and walked to Land’s End, one of his favourite walks and he ‘would go by the cliff route, returning by the road.’ No foul play was suggested; the unnamed witness to the fatal fall left the scene and Major Lyons, who had fractured the base of his skull, was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital. He died at 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning 23^rd September 1941 in Penzance. It was recorded as an ‘accidental death’ but due to circumstances of the missing witness it must remain an ‘open verdict’. His estate was worth near £3000. (16) The Probate was held at Westminster on 19^th November 1941 and the Beneficiary is Una May Lyons (17). I have been particularly drawn to E. F. Lyons as a possible candidate for the identity of Raymond Heywood – was his death an accident or was it suicide? Could he have written something as sentimental as ‘Last night beneath the stars, on sentry, go, / I saw the fairies dancing to and fro - /Just how they came and went / I do not know.’ Could he have imagined their ‘little fairy forms’ come towards him ‘before the moon had set’ and as ‘somewhere a cannon roared into the night, / And as I peered into the evening light / My fairies sighed – and vanished out of sight.’ [Fairies in Flanders. Roses, Pearls and Tears] or have sent this touching poem to the Devon and Exeter Gazette:

 
ANNIVERSARY
Nov 11^th 1919
 
Do we remember all our splendid men –
Now they are gone and life has lost its sweetness,
Shall we remember always – even when
Remembrance pales in Life’s far-off December –
As we do now in Summer’s sweet completeness,
Britain – shall we remember?
 
Oh! Day, too brief, ere Britain’s heroes went,
And Britain’s honoured flag with glory covered;
It seemed the peace we knew was only lent,
And Summer left our hearts for sad November;
Above our souls the pain of parting hovered,
Britain – do you remember?
 
Oh, let our love to those dear heroes go –
For all this earthly strife shall end to-morrow,
Strong in their memory, our souls did know
Not one regret for War’s expiring ember…
They would not wish us to have one thought of sorrow,
Britain – while we remember.
 
Raymond Heywood. [The Devon and Exeter Gazette. Tuesday 11^th November 1919. p. 3]

 

Captain (later Major and Lieutenant-Colonel) John Burnell Passmore, M.C., born 1894, Barnstaple, Devon, son of John Passmore (clothes manufacturer) and Fanny Burnell (Teacher of music and languages), they were married in 1890 in South Molton, Devon. Captain Passmore married Marian Ashton on 18^th December 1920 in Exeter and became a lecturer on agricultural engineering at Reading University and was a member of the Society of Engineers; he also published a book – ‘The English Plough’ in 1930. He died on 14^th August 1947 in Dorset. His obituary appeared in the North Devon Journal and Herald (18): ‘A Barumite’s Death. News has been received of the death at Weymouth of Lt.-Col. John Burnell Passmore, M.C. He was a native of Barnstaple, and was formerly a professor of agriculture at Reading University. He held the degree of B.S.C. (London) and M.S.C. (Reading). From 1938-40 he was Secretary to the National Fitness Committee of the West Riding of Yorkshire. During the 1914-18 war Lt.-Col. Passmore served with the Devons in France and Salonika, and later as an officer in the Royal Berkshire Terrritorials. In the 1939-45 war he commanded a heavy A.A. battery and served from 1941-44 with the West African Frontier Force, commanding the 4^th A.A. Regiment at Bathurst, Gambia. He also saw service in India. Since 1945 Mr Passmore has been manager of the Queen’s Court Hotel, Shanklin, Isle of Wight.’ Passmore certainly has the literary credentials to write wistful poetry but did he write the elegiac ‘To a Robin (in Flanders)’ – ‘(“For a moment even the guns seemed to have grown tired; there was a sudden calm – strangely beautiful. Somewhere a robin burst into song…” Extract from a letter.)

 
The Angelus at close of day was ringing
In some quiet place not very far away,
And ‘mid the solitude I heard you singing
A requiem for the sadness of the day.
 
Full of strong life your little voice I heard
Above so much around that spoke of death;
Singing when every other little bird
In that sad wilderness so little saith.
 
[To a Robin. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Captain Robert Wilfred Townsend, M.C., M.B.E., born 1^st June 1891, Exeter, Devon, son of James Townsend, born 27^th September 1842 (printer and wholesale commercial stationer) and Mary Ann Gadd, born 14^th September 1846 (married 12^th May 1870 in Lambeth). In 1881 James Townsend employed ’36 men 36 boys under 18 and 27 women and girls’ and had three servants; he died on 13^th April 1906 aged 63 (19) and Mary died on 7^th July 1918 in Exeter, aged 72 (20). Robert’s older brother, Reginald Stephen Townsend, born 10^th November 1882, served as a Captain with the Indian Army (Medical Service); he was married in Exeter on 5^th September 1912 to Caroline Parker and died 17^th January 1959 in Woldingham, Surrey; another brother, James Henry Townsend, born 16^th March 1879 (Exeter), educated at Cambridge University, became a clerk in Holy Orders and Rev. James Henry Townsend was married on 29^th April 1914 at Edmonton in Middlesex to Katie Languth. Herbert Townsend, born 1878, became a printer like his father James; he died in Exeter on 8^th September 1948.  Robert Wilfred Townsend served with the 10^th Devonshire Regiment in France and Salonika; at Petit Couronne, on 20^th September 1918 after the Bulgarians had ‘stole away in the night’ Captain Townsend writes: ‘I visited a bit of their line this afternoon. They have blown up a lot, but there are still some wonderful dugouts. The wire is tremendous everywhere.’ He goes on to say that ‘it is a pretty country, but the dust on the road has been simply awful. The Bulgar has gone quickly but it has been a fearfully hard march and I didn’t get in until 10 o’clock absolutely beat. However it is all part of a day’s work and we are finishing off the Bulgar in great style.’ (21) In the 1930’s he lived at Darnford House in Dunsford – ‘Chimney Fire at Dunsford. Exeter fire brigade were called Sunday to a fire at Dunsford, where a chimney of Darnford House had become ignited. Fears were entertained for the thatch roof and the roofs of surrounding houses, but the brigade soon had the outbreak under control. Darnford House is owned by Mr. A. Anstey, the Mayor of Exeter and is tenanted by Mr. Robert Wilfred Townsend.’ (22) Two years later another incident occurred in the form of a robbery: ‘Exeter Youth sent to Borstal’, a ’16 year old lorry boy Gordon Kenneth White’ was sentenced to three years borstal after pleading ‘guilty to breaking and entering the house of Robert Wilfred Townsend on May 27^th and stealing an A.R.P. badge’; White also broke into other houses, ‘stealing a gun, the property of Gordon Cowling Taylor, on June 3^rd and breaking out of Mr Taylor’s house’. (23) Townsend served as a Special Constable during the war of 1939-45 and was awarded the M.B.E. in 1946. He died in Exeter in 1982. Townsend is another officer who fascinates me and could possibly have written something as charming as the following lines from ‘Consummation’ [Roses, Pearls and Tears]: ‘A quiet room, wherein I fain would rest, / A long low window looking to the West, / A garden filled with roses blooming red, / And you, my dearest heart, when all is said.’ Or ‘Night at Tangier’ [The Windsor Magazine. 1922]:

 
The minarets gleam silver white,
A subtle silence fills the air;
Through the still watches of the night
The Muezzin chants the call to prayer.
Around the mosaic pillars cling
Pale purple-hued clematis flowers
From shadowed byways lilies fling
Their fragrance to the midnight hours.
Like azure wings of butterflies,
Blue wavelets dance upon the shore,
Lilting a song that never dies
That love is love for ever more.
Above the starlit city lies
A dream of vague imaginings,
While night bends down with whispered sighs
And folds me softly in her wings.

 

Captain Bertram Richard Dunning, born 20^th May 1892, Honiton, Devon, son of Alfred John Dunning (solicitor, died 18^th May 1934 aged 54) and Alberta Ann Giddy, born in South Africa (19^th March 1862, Cape Colony, Fort Beaufort. She died on 25^th March 1937). Bertram studied law and worked as a solicitor for the firm of ‘Dunning, Rundle & Stamp’ in Honiton. He died in 1982 in Honiton, Devon. His sister, Dorothy Shepstone Dunning was born on 26^th June 1886 and died in Honiton on 14^th June 1972; she never married. Dunning seems another possibility for assuming the pseudonym of Raymond Heywood and may well have written:

 
MAID O’ DEVON
 
In France I saw the roses go –
The blossoms withered from my sight;
But back in Devon your face aglow
Retains for me the rosy light.
 
In France I heard the gentle breeze
At morning, through the trees rejoice,
And I shall hear its melodies
In Devon – awakened in your voice.
 
In France, I think the tender blue
Of Autumn mist at twilight dies;
But I shall find the lovely hue
In Devon – mirrored in your eyes.
 
To-day the skies of France are dark,
And Summer’s roses cannot stay;
But Devon – and you my dearest heart
Will bring back loves eternal May.
 
[Maid O’ Devon. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Captain Straun Wright-Smith, born 1893, Victoria, Australia. In August 1914 he enlisted as a private in the Australian Imperial Force, 7^th Battalion; he served in Egypt and was promoted to sergeant. In April 1915 he served with the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, 2^nd Lieutenant, and then the 10^th Devons seeing action in France and Salonika. Wounded twice and married twice he was demobilised in August 1919 and returned to Australia where he worked as a solicitor/barrister. He died in Victoria, Australia in 1972.

 

Lieutenant Hector George Wimbush, born 24^th May 1893, Barnet, Middlesex, son of Philip Wimbush (born 1861 London) and Lena Emilie Hawkins (born 1865 Exeter), married 1891, Woburn, Bedfordshire. Hector attended Harrow School. He married Juan Thomas (1908-1978) on 9^th November 1935 in London and Hector died there in 1975.

 

Lieutenant Gilbert Battams Cornish Northey, born 5^th January 1892, Tavistock, Devon, son of Gilbert William Northey (1850-1892) and Lilie Maria Battams (1861-1942). Gilbert was educated at Cheltenham College and worked as a tea planter in Ceylon at the outbreak of the war. He was commissioned as a 2^nd Lieutenant in the 10^th Service Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, serving in France from 21^st September 1915, then Salonika to fight the Bulgarians; took part in the Battle of Horseshoe Hill in 1916 and the Battles of Doiran 1917 and 1918. 1^st July 1917 became Lieutenant; Acting Captain and Adjutant on 11^th April 1919. Service ended on 20^th January 1921 when he returned to tea planting in Ceylon (later, iron and rubber merchant). He married Gwendoline M. Howden in London in 1934 and lived at Churston Cottage, Churston Ferrers, ‘retired merchant, late Ceylon’. Died 12^th December 1945, in Totnes, Devon. Could Northey have written:

 
‘Once the skies were blue… very blue,
(Perhaps those happy days will come again!)
No shadows fell my way: I only knew
The tender joy of loving when you came,
 
Then the skies grew grey… leaden grey,
We knew the pain of parting – and your eyes
Shone brightly through your tears: our little day
Seemed shadowed by the sadness of the skies.’
 
[Retrospect. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Lieutenant (later Brigadier) Cyrus Greenslade, C.B.E. born 13^th May 1892, Torquay, Devon, son of William Francis Greenslade (brewer and wine merchant) and Rose Blanche Hodge. Served with the 10^th Battalion, Devonshire Regiment at Salonika and in Turkey 1921-23. In 1919 he was Staff Captain with the British Military Mission to the Baltic and at Staff College in Camberley 1926-28; Instructor at the War Office 1931-34; served in India 1934-38 with the Yorkshire & Lancashire Regiment; Commanding Officer 1^st Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment; France December 1939-May 1940. He married Edith Margaret Johnson on 2^nd January 1918 in Bath Abbey, Somerset and died on 30^th October 1985 in West Chinnock, Somerset.

 

Lieutenant Norman Greenslade, M.C., D.F.C., born 1897, Torquay, Devon, brother of Cyrus Greenslade and son of William Francis Greenslade (brewer and wine merchant) and Rose Blanche Hodge. Norman was overseas with the 10^th Devons on 22^nd September 1915 (he was awarded the M.C. in January 1918 while with the Devons) and on 18^th October 1918 he became 2^nd Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force (temporary commission). Attended the School of Aeronautics, Heliopolis in the spring of 1919. In April 1920 he was awarded the D.F.C. for action in 1919 when ‘Flying Officer Norman Greenslade, M.C. “A” Detachment (10^th Devonshire Regiment) on August 27^th 1919, at Cherni Yar, this officer carried out a raid at a very low altitude on the assembled flotilla of Bolshevist vessels, and by accurate bombing was largely instrumental in the success which followed.’

 

Lieutenant George Rolston Bennett, born 1887, Stoke Damerel, Devon, son of William Edward Bennett and Sabina Elizabeth Rolston (married 15^th March 1886 in Stoke Damerel). George worked as a mining surveyor and served with the 10^th Devons as transport officer. He emigrated on 15^th May 1925, aged 38, to Bombay, India from London on the ‘Caledonia’. He possibly died at Bathavon, Somerset in 1954, aged 67. Could Lieutenant Bennett have written such lines as: ‘Dear lips – in dreams, come back to me again, / And kiss me on the brow; ‘twill ease the pain. / Be true, dear heart – and then if death should come, / I shall not fear – your love will guide me home.’ [Supplication. Roses, Pears and Tears] or ‘Yesterday – or so it seems - / The world was glad (‘twas only dreams!) / And God looked down on a happy land / Where life and love walked hand in hand.’ [The Garden of Suffering. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

Lieutenant Herbert Goad, born 1890, Surrey, son of Francis Henry Goad (born 1860, civil engineer’s assistant) and Mildred Parsons (1859-1917), married 1880, Southwark, London. Herbert died in 1954 at St. Albans in Hertfordshire, aged 64.

 

Lieutenant John Newton Herapath, born 8^th January 1893, Winslow, Cheshire, son of Edwin Loud Herapath and Caroline Elizabeth Herapath (married 1884). John went to Canada in October 1920 and New York in 1937. He studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School and died in Florida on 24^th February 1981.

 

Lieutenant Kenneth Cecil Nichols, born 1883, Lewisham, son of Charles Cecil Nichols (Eastern and Australian merchant) and Frances De la Mare (married 1877 Croydon) [Frances died in Reigate in 1894]. Kenneth worked as a clerk and served in the Wiltshire Regiment and 10^th Devons. He died in London in 1943.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Reginald Clarence Weymouth-Wilson, born 6^th March 1891. He enlisted as an ordinary signalman in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1914 (Military service number London Z/506); served with the 10^th Devons, wounded in May 1916; married Winifred Gladys Roberts (1898-1982) in Helston, Cornwall in 1919 and had six children: Pamela I. M. (b. 1920), Reginald David (b. 1921), John H. (b. 1924), Diana S. (b. 1927), Victoria Regwin (1928-1993) and Alexander C. (b. 1932). Reginald Clarence Weymouth-Wilson died in Cornwall in 1967 aged 77.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Andrew Fowle, born 1895, Pewsey, Wiltshire, son of landowner, William Hugh Fowle (1853-1942), B.A. Trinity College, Cambridge 1875, (eldest son of Thomas Everett Fowle Esq. of Chute Lodge, Hampshire), educated at Rugby. J. P. Wiltshire, Major 1^st Battalion Wiltshire Rifle Volunteers 1879; Lord of the manor of Chute Forest, a student of Lincoln’s Inn, 22^nd November 1875 (called to the bar 25^th June 1879) and Isabel Lucy Curtis of Everleigh Manor House, married November 1884. In 1911 Andrew is an Army Student boarding in Blatchington, Sussex. He died in 1952.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Percy Gilbert Whitehouse, born 15^th August 1893, Edgbaston, Birmingham, son of John Benjamin Whitehouse (builder) and Annie Tranter. Percy died 24^th September 1959.

 

Lieutenant (later Captain) Percival Hamilton Thomson, born 1894 Upton on Severn, Malvern, Worcestershire, son of James Thomson (tailor) born Scotland 1853 and Jane H. Thomson, born Scotland 1856. Percival married Gertrude A. Spicer in Paddington, 1920. He died in London in 1954.

 

Lieutenant Roy Gladstone Jefferson, born 1885 West Ham, Essex, son of Frederick Charles Jefferson (house furnisher and warehouseman) and Ann Elizabeth Clingh. Roy worked as a clerk at the Gas and Water Company and married Elizabeth Marjory Theresa Spreckley in Victoria, Australia, 1923. He died 27^th August 1934 in Victoria, Australia.

 

ON PATROL
 
There were dead men on the wire
Lying in the bloodied mire –
Staring wildly at the skies
With their cold and sightless eyes –
Stars, grinned down with hideous faces,
And the moon was mocking them with grimaces.
 
[from The Greater Love]

 

 

2^nd Lieutenant James Thomas John Hollom, born 1897, Islington, London, son of James Thomas Hollom and Alice Mary Windett (married 1888 St. Pancras). J. T. J. Hollom married Elsie M. Howard at Marylebone in 1923 and Elinor H. H. Carter at Hove in Sussex in 1945. He died in 1960 in Sussex.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Harold Seymour Adams, born 1891, St. George’s Hanover Square, London, son of Herbert Arthur Adams and Ethel Julia Burnett. Harold married Lilian Frances Longsdon Woore in Newton Abbot, Devon in 1921; Lilian died on 25^th October 1941 in Newton Abbott.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (later Captain) Ernest Henry Taylor, born 1892, Forest Hall, Northumberland, son of Shemelds Taylor (1847-1901), commercial traveller (grocery) of Forest Hall, Northumberland and Henrietta Greener, married 1878 (Shemelds later married Evelyn Derrett in 1893). In 1911 Ernest is a jeweller’s assistant in Powys, Wales and he married Winifred Gwendolin Green (1894-1975) on 23^rd August 1917 in Gloucestershire. He served with the 10^th Devons and the Machine Gun Corps. Ernest Henry Taylor of the Machine Gun Corps was an officer taken prisoner-of-war in the March offensive of 1918, incarcerated in Germany for eight months, first at Rastatt, Baden before being taken to Mainz. Taylor had the idea of establishing a ‘future career society’ and wrote ‘A Project for a Memorial’, dated Mainz, Germany, September 1918. (24) He was released at the end of the war and died in Durham in 1968 aged 76.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (later Captain) John Eugene De Mohun Dunster, born 1881 Kensington, London, son of John Dunster and Mary Monckton (married 1873). Worked at Great Western Railway (Paddington) like his father. Commissioned into 10^th Devons at Bath in February 1915; Captain 11^th Reserve Labour Corps, September 1916. He died in 1965.

 

2^nd Lieutenant George Edward Stirling Montagu, born 1874 in Jersey, son of George Edward Montagu (landowner) and Annie Mary Augusta Delvin. G. E. S. Montagu married on three occasions: Doris Mary Irwin Cockin (1910 Marylebone), Nora Ellen Hone Kempson (1938 Proughly) and Gladys Ivy Hobson (1943 Devizes). He died in 1956 in Devizes aged 82.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Charles Henry Cosway, born 15^th July 1891, Tiverton, Devon, son of Richard Philip Cosway (1853-1930, bank clerk) and Bessie Werk (1851-1934). In 1911 Charles Henry is an ‘auctioneer pupil’ living at Lime Cottage, Tiverton. He died in 1971, in Devon.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (later Captain) Cyril Donald Webber, born 23^rd May 1891, Bridgewater, Somerset, son of William Henry Webber and Marie Board. Married Cassie Mildred Hunter (1893-1982) in 1928; he died in Vancouver, Canada on 18^th April 1962.

 

2^nd Lieutenant William Edwin Arthur Hitchcock, born 1885, Dartford, Kent, son of John Arthur Hitchcock (factory engineer) and Mary Ann Throne (married 1879). He married Minnie Reeves in 1913 and died in Crayford, Kent in 1954.

 

2^nd Lieutenant John Bazet Salusbury Notley, born 26^th December 1892, Totnes, Devon, son of Rev. James Notley of Diptford Rectory and Grace Doveton. John or ‘Jack’ as he was known as was educated at Keble College, Oxford and like his father was a keen fly-fisher. He served with the 10^th Devons until he contracted Trench Fever and was hospitalised in several institutions (three in France) for almost two years. In 1919 he taught fly-fishing and married twice: Rebecca Gedge Pearce in Bodmin, 1924 and Dorothy Joan Stephanie Bellinger in Totnes, Devon on 21^st October 1945. He died in 1985 in Newton Abbot, Devon.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Arthur Donald Skene Catling, born 26^th February 1896, Sculcoates, Yorkshire, son of Charles Brian Catling (Bank Manager) and Florence Margaret Maria Douthwaithe. Arthur was a journalist who became Head of the Mail Features Department at Reuters and became Chairman of the London District of the Institute of Journalists in 1929. He published a rather unsuccessful novel, ‘Fever Heat’ (Methuan. London) in 1931 under the name ‘Skene Catling’ and later in 1940, a work for which he is better known – ‘Vanguard to Victory: An Account of the British Expeditionary Force During its First Months in France in the Second Great War’ (Methuan. London). He married Sheila Hoolihan, travelled to New York in 1940 and emigrated, aged 49, to Montreal, Canada on 6^th November 1945. He died in Arizona on 5^th October 1949. Although Catling had literary ambitions I don’t believe he with his rough journalistic skills could have written anything as sublime as Heywood’s lines from his poem – ‘A Prayer’ and kept silent about it:

 
To-day my hero-lover went away;
It was so hard to part;
I stand alone – the hours
Are sad and long, - the flowers
Are drooping, like my heart.
To-day my hero-lover went away.
 
To-day my hero-lover went away,
He looked so strong, and now
He’ll tread the soul that’s red
With life-blood of God’s dead.
He kissed me on the brow –
My hero-lover when he went away.
 
[A Prayer. Roses, Pearls and Tears]

 

or ‘Destiny’ from the same volume which begins: ‘One wondrous little hour of perfect bliss, / A million stars set in a sapphire sky, / A little love, a sigh, a little kiss - / And then, “Good-bye”.’ and ends: ‘Oh that my dream so quickly should depart! / The skies are grey, in which all stars have set; / A bitter pain, a tear, a broken heart - / I can’t, I can’t forget.’ There is an erotic element to the poems which is maybe why Heywood wanted to remain anonymous but they can also be viewed from a feminine aspect which his readers would identify with.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Harold Darlington Henry Court, M.B.E., born 24^th November 1891, Kingston, Surrey, son of Edward Darlington Court (died 3^rd April 1935 aged 72, Exeter) and Edith Wilson (died 13^th November 1931, Exeter). Harold worked as a civil mechanical engineer and enlisted on 30^th September 1914. He was awarded the M.B.E. in 1919 and married Marie Dadiani in Constantinople, Turkey, on 23^rd April 1921. He died in Sussex in 1968.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (later Captain) Arthur Hicks Peck, D.S.O., M.C., born 25^th April 1889, Darjeeling, India, son of Lt. Col. Francis Samuel Peck of Bristol. Arthur was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and Christ’s College, Cambridge (1903-06). He served with the Royal Fusiliers and10^th Devonshires (7^th December 1914, 2^nd Lieutenant). He joined the Royal Flying Corps on 4^th October 1916; Flight Lieutenant on 24^th October 1919 and later Captain. He served in France and Salonika; married Marjorie Amy Clare Smith in Bristol in 1920 and died on 14^th February 1975 in Cornwall.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Harold Diggines, born 12^th June 1891, Exeter, Devon, son of George Diggines (builder, 1853-1908) and Emily Lake. Harold was educated at Exeter School and the University of London and worked as a clerk. He married Dorothy M. Burdge (1888-1964) in Camberwell in 1916. He died in Lancashire in 1978.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Geoffrey Denis Lock, M.C., M.B.E., born 30^th July 1889, Barnstaple, Devon, son of William Henry Lock (surveyor) and Marian Elizabeth Lane. Geoffrey was a dealer in works of art and antiques. He married Barbara Penelope Mallett in Bath in 1915; as the Chief Warden of the Civil Defence Service in Bath he was awarded the M.B.E. in 1945.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Edward James George Mudge, born 18^th May 1895, Exeter, Devon, eldest son of Edward Mudge (builder) and Anne Maria Tucker. Edward attended West Somerset County School and passed the matriculation held at University College, Exeter in February 1912. Edward James George Mudge died in Exeter in 1933 aged 38.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Charles Frederick C. Featherstonhaugh, born 8^th November 1899, Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, son of William Featherstonhaugh (1869-1939), shoe-maker and Senior Director of Messers C & W Featherstonhaugh Ltd. Leather manufacturers, and Florence Ellen Perkins (1870-1951), married 18^th April 1892, Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire. C. F. C. Featherstonhaugh enlisted in 1914 as a signalman in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (Bristol Z/6825); served with the 10^th Devonshire Regiment. He married Mildred Rose Newman (1903-1951) in 1930 and died on 20^th January 1981 aged 81 in Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire.

 

2^nd Lieutenant Percy Redcliffe Harvey, born 1884, Plymouth, Devon, son of Frank A. Harvey (baker, shop keeper) and Lavinia Anna Shute. Percy died in Devon in 1961.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (later Captain) Samuel Hugh Duff, M.C., born 1882, Dudley, Worcestershire, son of Samuel Hugh Duff (1852-1896), chartered accountant (solicitor) of ‘Duff & Son’, glass and china dealers, 235a Market Place, Dudley, and Louisa Bond, born 1853 married at Warwick in 1878. In 1911 Samuel Hugh Duff (born 1882), a solicitor like his father and also a managing director of Dartmouth’s Palladium Cinema, Hanover Street, was involved in a German spy case. Samuel met a German named Max Schultz who began visiting the cinema when his yacht, the ‘Egret’ was moored on the River Dart near the Royal Naval College; Schultz, who claimed to have a Doctorate in Philosophy, also met Duff at Plymouth and began asking questions regarding naval affairs in Plymouth and Dartmouth. Schultz said that he was a correspondent for a German newspaper; Duff who grew suspicious went to the police who advised him to give Schultz false information and keep on good terms. Schultz paid Duff £50 a month and on 17^th August 1911 he was arrested in Plymouth and it was discovered that he was actually a Lieutenant in the German Army. The trial began on 28^th August and Duff acted as prosecutor. Schultz was sentences to 21 months in prison. In 1914 Duff enlisted in the Devonshire Regiment, serving with the 10^th and the 8^th Battalions. He was awarded the M.C. in 1917. Following the war Duff, who was affected by it never returned to his previous work as solicitor, he went to West Africa and became a peace magistrate; he died there in 1920 of typhoid fever.

 

2^nd Lieutenant (Adjutant) Howard Mercer, born 14^th May 1896, Streatham, Surrey, son of Edward James Mercer, born 1869, Bermondsey, London, bank clerk and financial agent and Ellen Lissaman King, born 1869, Belfast, Ireland (died 1944, Colchester) married in 1894 in Camberwell. Howard died in Dorset in 1973.

 
AT STAND DOWN
 
Above the trench I heard the night wind sigh,
Across the tattered sandbags moonbeams lay,
While Flanders stars shone overhead, and I
Alone with thought of you at close of day.
 
The cannon’s angry roar had died away
And left the stillness of a Summer’s night
For one sweet hour of peace that would not stay,
And I could rest before the coming fight.
 
And then I saw a star shoot in the West…
I wonder if beyond the silver sea
It found you somewhere in its loving quest –
And pressed a kiss upon your lips from me?
 
[from The Greater Love]

 

Following the end of the war Heywood rejoiced in the peace and sent sundry verse to various newspapers, as this from The Devon and Exeter Gazette of July 1919:

 
PEACE
 
Peace is here! The bells are ringing
Through this land of ours to-day,
While a nation’s voice is singing
From a heart both glad and gay;
Through a myriad streets are blending
Merry shout and hearty cheer,
Everywhere is joy unending…
Peace is here!
 
Peace is here! The night of sorrow
Is forgotten with our tears,
There is laughter for to-morrow –
Joy for all these latter years;
Banish thoughts of care and sadness,
Cast away each passing fear,
There is only room for gladness…
Peace is here!
 
Out in Flanders, out in France
Sleep a nation’s hero dead,
Where the sunbeams softly dance
On each lowly hero bed;
Roses bloom where they are sleeping,
Birds are singing in the air;
Safe are they within God’s keeping…
Peace, sweet peace is there! (25)

 

It is very unusual for a poet to suddenly lay down his or her pen and write no more; it is more common that the poet may turn to prose writing but to abstain completely from writing is strange. Why was there such silence after 1922? Did Heywood die or did he emigrate?

 
LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
 
A down my garden path I see
Chrysanthemums in bloom;
They blow beside the Devon sea
‘Mid Winter’s twilight gloom;
Some golden petals are ablaze,
And some are snowy white,
That quiver in the evening haze
Beneath the stars’ pale light.
 
The wind may sigh ‘mid silent eaves
For summer that is dead;
I do not heed the faded leaves,
Nor miss the roses red,
For memories of other days
Are borne upon the breeze,
While I remember perfumed sprays
Upon the lilac trees.
 
The moonlight sheds its silver beams
Across the sea of Devon;
My garden path is filled with dreams
And peace that breathes of heaven.
What though the year is growing old,
And sunny hours depart,
Chrysanthemums of white and gold
Keep summer in my heart. (26)

 

Without further evidence the identity of Raymond Heywood must remain, like the death of Major Ernest Frederick Lyons, an open verdict! My intention was to reveal the man behind the pseudonym, the soldier-poet behind the mystery, but the adventure of the research has taken me into exploring a little of the history behind the officers of the 10^th Devons which in itself has been rewarding and although there is no definite conclusion as to Heywood’s identity the task has not been a thankless one, although it has been often frustrating. Heywood’s intention to remain anonymous has been a complete success but perhaps a private letter may turn up in the future linking the poet to an officer of the Devonshire Regiment, but for now we must honour those who gave so much and remember the words of the poet, Raymond Heywood, inspired by his ‘love and tenderness’:

 
MY ADVOCATE
 
Oh little book of mine
Indeed ‘twill be my gain
If some quiet thought of thine
Has eased the bitter pain
Of some poor aching heart,
In this sad world to-day.
This is thy little part
To comfort by the way.
 
I only ask you this,
Oh little book of mine –
If one has pressed a kiss
Upon a page of thine,
Then little book, confess
‘Twas from my inmost shrine
That love and tenderness
Inspired these words of mine!
 
[from Roses, Pearls, and Tears]

 

 

* I wonder if Heywood was aware while he was writing ‘Rest and Quietness’ on 10^th February 1917, that a soldier in his company, private Francis Thomas Mullins, born 15^th March 1897, Axminster, Devon, was also writing poetry – ‘The Night of the Stunt on Petit Couranne’ (manuscript poem held at the University of Leeds Special Collections: GB 206 Liddle Collection. SAL 044). Private Mullins survived the war and died in Devon on 27^th July 1987. Also serving in Salonika (R.A.M.C.) was the Scottish poet, Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978) who wrote under the pen name, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’. In a letter to his brother dated 1^st September 1916 he included a poem, ‘A Salonikan Storm Song’. He was invalided out in 1918 suffering from malaria. And over in the 10^th Irish Division we find chaplain, Rev. Edward Griffith Evans who published his poems: ‘Remembering Salonika: Poems’ in The Mosquito, number 7. September 1929; while with the 7^th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment is Edward Owen Rutter (1899-1944) who took part in the Battle of Horshoe Hill and Doiran and wrote under the pen name ‘Klip Klip’ in the Balkan News – see his parody of  Longfellow’s ‘the Song of Hiawatha’, ‘The Song of Tiadatha’ (1920).

 

 Photograph Of Raymond Heywood: The Bookman, January 1919, volume 55, issue 328, p. 131.

NOTES:

 

1. Untitled poem by Raymond Heywood. The Sphere. Number 77. Saturday 14^th June 1919. (‘Woman’s Sphere’ by Olivia.) p. 234.

2. Poems appeared in the following periodicals: ‘Retrospect’ in Pearson’s Magazine (263). November 1917; ‘Down Devon Way’ in Windsor Magazine. January 1918; ‘Fairies in Flanders’ in Pearson’s Magazine (268). April 1918; ‘Rest’ in Pearson’s Magazine (269). May 1918; ‘Afterglow’ in Colour Magazine. August 1918. Volume 9. p. 7; ‘Red, White and Blue’ in Pearson’s Magazine (275). November 1918; ‘A Memory’ in Pearson’s Magazine (276). December 1918’ ‘Late Chrysanthemums’ in Windsor Magazine. December 1919; ‘Devon in April’ in Pearson’s Magazine (280). April 1919; ‘Night at Tangier’ in Windsor Magazine. June 1922.

3. The Western Times. Monday 17^th June 1918. p. 2.

4. The Tatler. (The Letters of Eve). 17^th July 1918. p. 60.

5. ‘Tell me, do the roses blow?’ The Greater Love. 1919. Also The Globe. (Book Gossip). Thursday 29^th May 1919. p. 3. Several of Heywood’s lyrics were set to music: ‘I’m Coming Back To Dear Old England’, words: Raymond Heywood, music: Harold Leslie Perry. Weekes & Co. London. 1918. ‘My Dream Moon’, words: Raymond Heywwod, music: Harold Leslie Perry. The John Church Company, Wigmore Street. London. 1918. ‘Laddie wi’ the April Eyes’, [‘Laddie wi’ the April eyes,/ Long wonder where ye roam / Wand’ring ‘neath them foreign skies,/ Be ye never comin’ home?’] words: Raymond Heywood, music: Charles Willeby. The John Church Company, Wigmore Street. London. 1920. ‘Tell Me Do The Roses Blow?’ words: Raymond Heywood, music: Bernard Green. Enoch & Sons. 58 Great Marlborough Street. London. 1920. – ‘Sweetly pretty are both words and music of this little love song, and when one knows it to be sung by Madame Clara [Ellen] Butt [1872-1936], what need to say more in its praise? The voice is in contrast to the accompaniment, and produces the most melodious of effects.’ (Montrose Standard and Angus and Mearns Register. Friday 5^th November 1920. p. 6. Also the Dundee Courier. Saturday 1^st January 1921. p. 8)

6. The Devon and Exeter Gazette. (Books - Some new volumes). Saturday 31^st May 1919. p. 4.

7. Rose Leaves. Roses, Pearls and Tears. Also found in ‘Reynold’s News’. London. Sunday 25^th May 1924. p. 12.

8. Down Devon Way. Roses, Pearls and Tears. Also found in the Windsor Magazine, vol xlvii, Dec 1917-May 1918. p. 166. And the Reading Mercury, Oxford Gazette, Newbury Herald, and Berks County Paper. Saturday 19^th January 1918. p. 10.

9. ‘Remembrance’. Roses, Pearls and Tears. Erskine Macdonald. London. 1918. Also published in The Daily Mirror. Saturday 3^rd August 1918. p. 6.

10. Princess Christian is Princess Helena Augusta Victoria (25^th May 1846-9^th June 1923), daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who later became Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. The Devon and Exeter Gazette. (Correspondence). Saturday 20^th September 1919. p. 3.

11. ‘An officer of the Devon Regt., Lieut. Raymond Heywood, has published, through Erskine Macdonald, a collection of poems under the title of “Roses, Pearls, and Tears”. The verses were mostly written in the trenches of France and the East while Lieut. Heywood was serving with the Devons, and are aptly described as “a treasury of remembrance to all who have known the sadness and sacrifices of war.” It is interesting to know that one of Devon’s own regiment has joined the ranks – already imposing ranks – of our soldier poets.’ The Western Times. Monday 17^th June 1918. p. 2.

12. ‘Pro Patria Mori’. The Greater Love. Elkin Mathews. London. 1919.

13. To The Dead. Lieut. Raymond Heywood, Devon Regiment. The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph. Wednesday 4^th January 1922. p. 4

14. Major’s Fatal Fall by Land’s End. The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph. Thursday 2^nd October 1941. p. 7. There is also an article concerning a ‘Captain Ernest Frederick Lyons’ of the ‘4^th Tank Battalion’ who was fined 5 shillings for having a ‘motor car without lights (left the Drill Hall, Wareham, whilst dance was in progress)’ which may relate to him! [The Western Gazette. Wareham County Petty Sessions (second court). Friday 15^th December 1922. p. 9]

15. Probably Gaston Barthelemy De Chameroy born in France, 1872, died 1953, who married Emily Gertrude Poole (born in Folkestone) in Fulham in 1893. In 1901 they are boarding at Bouverie Square, Elham, Folkestone, Kent and in 1911 they are living at the Old Cottage, Bishopsbourne, Canterbury, Kent. Gaston is 38 and a ‘private tutor’, ‘naturalized British in 1895’ and Emily Gertrude Chameroy, 40, is ‘British by parentage’. Emily died on 19^th March 1946 aged 82 in Penzance; Gaston died in Cornwall in 1953.

16. Western Wills – Cornwall and Devon Estates. ‘Maj. Ernest Frederick Lyons. Middlesex Regt, of Oakway, Alford, Cranleigh, Surrey, who died at Penzance on September 23 last, has left estate of the gross value of £2,906, with net personality £2,871.’ The Western Morning News. Saturday 29^th November 1941. p. 5.

17. Una May Lyons, born 1887, Ipswich, Suffolk, daughter of Frederick John Charles Lyons (born 9^th April 1846 St. Luke’s, Middlesex; died 4^th February 1900, Richmond, Surrey) and Emily Pickering Crux, born 1864, Thanet, Kent; died 18^th November 1915). They were married at St. Luke’s, London on 18^th February 1886 [Hampshire Advertiser. Wednesday 24^th February 1866. p. 2]. I do not know the connection to Ernest Frederick Lyons but Frederick J. C. Lyons may be his father? Frederick J. C. Lyons M.D. of the Royal Army Medical Corps: 1^st October 1867: Staff Assistant Surgeon; 22^nd December 1869: Assistant Surgeon to the 92^nd (Gordon Highlanders) Regiment of Foot; he served in the Afghan war from 1878-80; 1^st October 1879: Surgeon-Major; 1^st October 1887: Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel; October 1888: served in Bombay Command, India, General Duties, Poona District; 4^th November 1893: Brigade-Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel; 9^th November 1894: arrived at Malta Garrison from England; 1895: Officer in charge of Valletta Station Hospital; 1896: resident at the Imperial Hotel, Sliema; 22^nd February 1897: Resident at Imperial Hotel, Sliema and went to Colchester on sick leave; 13^th October 1897: Retired. In 1901 13 year old Una May Lyons is at Linden Gardens, Kensington boarding at a boarding house kept by Florence F. Schroeder, a 40 year old, single woman born in London in 1861. Una’s 30 year old widowed mother Emily Pickering Lyons is at the same address. Una never married and died in 1966 in Surrey at the age of 78.

18. Barnstaple Brevities. A Barumite’s Death. The North Devon Journal and Herald. 4^th September 1947. p. 4. J. B. Passmore, aged 54, was father of ‘Ann, Elizabeth and Richard (Dick)’ [Obituary: Western Gazette. 21^st August 1947]

19. Obituary. Western Times. 16^th April 1906. p. 1.

20. Obituary. Western Times. 11^th July 1918. p. 1. (also 12^th July 1918. p. 4.

21. Private papers of Captain Robert Wilfred Townsend, 10^th Devons (79^th Brigade, 26^th Division), Salonika Campaign 1815-18, almost 300 letters held at the Imperial War Museum, catalogue number Documents 11443.

22. The Western Times. Friday 12^th March 1937. p. 3.

23. Express and Echo. Tuesday 4^th July 1939. p. 5.

24. The Empire’s War Memorial and a Project for a British Imperial University of Commerce. Ernest H. Taylor and J. B. Black M.A., B.A. (pamphlet) Macniven & Wallace. Edinburgh. 1920.

25. Peace. The Devon and Exeter Gazette. Saturday 19^th July 1919. p. 3.

26. The Windsor Magazine. Volume LI, December 1919-May 1920. p. 39. Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd.

 

 

FURTHER READING:

 

The Devonshire Regiment 1914-1918. C. T. Atkinson. Exeter: Eland Brothers. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent. 1926.

The Gardeners of Salonika: The Macedonian Campaign 1915-1918. Alan Palmer. Deutsch. 1965.

Poets & Pals of Picardy: A Weekend on the Somme. Mary Ellen Freeman and Ted Smith. Leo Cooper/Pen & Sword. Barnsley. 1990.

Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches. Martin Taylor. Constable. 1989.

Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry. Vivien Noakes. Sutton. 2006.

English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography. Catherine W. Reilly. George Prior Publishers. London. 1978.