Stanley Casson was born in 1889 and educated at Merchant Taylors School in London. He went up to Oxford in 1909 and in 1913 was elected to a Studentship at the British School of Archaeology in Athens. He joined the Army in 1914 and served with the East Lancashire Regiment in France. He was wounded in the leg in 1915.
After recovering, Casson served in Salonika and wrote a book about his experiences during the First World War, which includes an extremely interesting account of his time in Salonika - “Steady Drummer” by Stanley Casson (G. Bell & Sons Ltd., London, 1935).
Stanley Casson was Mentioned in Dispatches and awarded the Greek Order of the Saviour.
Stanley worked in Greece after the war and was instrumental in ensuring Rupert Brooke, who was Britain's best known soldier poet during the First World War, had a fitting memorial on the Island of Skyros.
"Ploughboy Soldiers" by Stanley Casson
These men were young and all they owned was youth;
They knew the rising and the set of day;
They knew the colds and fields; their store of Truth
Was blended with the cornfields and the clay.
Was blended with the cornfields and the clay.
This was their landed property, for they were born
From rich inheritance of years untold;
They gave it all to make new fields of corn
To grow new valleys rich with August gold.
By kind permission of Stanley's daughter Lady Jennifer MacLellan who edited her Father's poems from his notebooks: "Poems from the Great War" by Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Casson A Soldier in two World Wars, published and printed by Napier University, Edinburgh, 2001.
 |
| Cover of current version of "Steady Drummer" by Stanley Casson |
