Educated at St Paul's School, Gilbert went on to study at the Slade School of Art, planning to become an illustrator. As an adult, Gilbert was a large man, 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall and about 20 stone 6 pounds (130 kg; 286 lb) in weight. His rotund girth gave rise to an anecdote during the First World War, when a lady in London asked why he was not "out at the Front"; he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am."
On 28th June 1901, Gilbert married Frances Blogg in St Mary Abbots, Kensington. Frances was also a poet, (see http://femalewarpoets.blogspot.com/2022/03/frances-chesterton-1869-1938-british.html). She was passionate about her husband’s writing, encouraged him and acted as his personal assistant. In 1909 the couple moved to Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where they lived until their deaths.
Gilbert served as a member of the British Propaganda Bureau during WW1.
As well as being a poet, writer and journalist, Gilbert was also a talented artist. He illustrated several books.
Cecil, who also became a poet, joined the Highland Light Infantry as a Private and served on the Western Front. Wounded three times, Cecil died on 6th December 1918.
Gilbert died on 14th June 1936, and his wife, Frances, died on 12th December 1938.
Gilbert’s WW1 poetry collections were:
“Poems” (Burns & Oats, 1915)
“The Ballad of St. Barbara and other verses” (Cecil Palmer, 1922)
"Collected poems" (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1927)
“Collected poems” (Methuen, 1933)
and he had poems published in 25 WW1 anthologies.
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| Captain Charles Fryatt |
TO CAPTAIN FRYATT*
TRAMPLED yet red is the last of the embers,
Red the last cloud of a sun that has set;
What of your sleeping though Flanders remembers,
What of your waking, if England forget?
Why should you share in the hearts that we harden,
In the shame of our nature, who see it and live?
How more than the godly the greedy can pardon,
How well and how quickly the hungry forgive.
Ah, well if the soil of the stranger had wrapped you,
While the lords that you served and the friends that you knew
Hawk in the marts of the tyrants that trapped you,
Tout in the shops of the butchers that slew.
Why should you wake for a realm that is rotten,
Stuffed with their bribes and as dead to their debts?
Sleep and forget us, as we have forgotten;
For Flanders remembers and England forgets.
From “The Ballad of St. Barbara and other verses” by G.K. Chesterton (Cecil Palmer, London, 1922) (St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery and of those in danger of sudden death.)
NOTE:
Captain Charles Algernon Fryatt (2 December 1872 – 27 July 1916) was a British mariner who was executed by the Germans for attempting to ram a U-boat in 1915. When his ship, the SS Brussels, was captured off the Netherlands in 1916, he was court-martialled and sentenced to death because he had attacked the submarine as a civilian non-combatant. International outrage followed his execution near Bruges, Belgium. In 1919, his body was reburied with full honours in the United Kingdom.
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| Captain Fryatt's ship - The S.S. Brussels |
Sources: Find my Past, Free BMD
Catherine W. Reilly.- “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) p. 84. and
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32167/32167-h/32167-h.htm
