Francis Brett Young (1884 – 1954) – writer, poet, playwright, composer, doctor and soldier

With thanks to Stanley Kaye (The Poppy Man)* for finding this poet for us and for sending

me the photograph he took of the Memorial to Francis in the British National Memorial Arboretum

Portrait - artist unknown

Francis Brett Young was born in Halesowen, Dudley, Worcestershire, UK.  His parents were Thomas Brett Young, a medical doctor, and his wife, Annie Elizabeth Young, nee Jackson, who were married in Leicester in 1883.  Francis’s mother was also from a medical family.

Initially educated at a private preparatory school in Sutton Coldfield, Francis went on to Epsom College, a school for the sons of doctors.  He then went to train as a doctor at the University of Birmingham.  While there, Francis met his future wife – Jessie Hankinson - who was training at Anstey College of Physical Education. 

Francis began his medical career on the steamship SS Kintuck, on a voyage to the Far East, before taking on a practice in Devonshire in 1907. Francis and Jessie were married in Axbridge, Somerset, UK in 1908. His wife was a singer and he accompanied her as well as setting poems to music for her.

During the First World War, Francis served in the East African Campaign in German East Africa in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a medical officer with the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment. He was invalided out in 1918 and no longer able to practise medicine.  Francis wrote about his WW1 experiences in his book entitled “Marching on Tanga” which was heavily censored before publication in 1917.  The book is available to read as a free download on Archive:

https://archive.org/stream/dli.ernet.16384/16384-Marching%20On%20Tanga_djvu.txt 

THE GIFT

Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain

Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,

England came to me - me who had always ta'en

But never given before -- England, the giver,

In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver

On still evenings of summer, after rain,

By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver

When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.

Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,

And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake

Shivering all night through till cold daybreak:

In that I count these sufferings my gain

And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain

Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.

AFTER ACTION

All through that day of battle the broken sound

Of shattering Maxim fire made mad the wood;

So that the low trees shuddered where they stood,

And echoes bellowed in the bush around:

But when, at last the light of day was drowned,

That madness ceased.... Ah, God, but it was good!

There, in the reek of iodine and blood,

I flung me down upon the thorny ground.

So quiet was it, I might well have been lying

In a room I love, where the ivy cluster shakes

Its dew upon the lattice panes at even:

Where rusty ivory scatters from the dying

Jessamine blossom, and the musk-rose breaks

Her dusky bloom beneath a summer heaven.

From “Poems 1916 – 1918” by Francis Brett Young, (W. Collins Sons & Co, Ltd., London, 1919), which is available to read as a free download on Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40344/40344-h/40344-h.html

Francis Brett Young’s WW1 poetry collections were:

“Five Degrees South (and other poems)”,  (Martin Secker, 1917)

“The Island (poems)”, (Heinemann, London, 1944)

“Poems, 1916-1918” (Collins, 1919)

And he had poems published in nine WW1 Anthologies.

Sources:  FreeBMD, Find my Past, 

Catherine W. Reilly, “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) p. 345 

https://allpoetry.com/Francis-Brett-Young

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40344/40344-h/40344-h.html

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw221799/Francis-Brett-Young

https://www.thenma.org.uk/

Photo by Stanley Kaye

An arboretum (plural: arboreta) is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees of a wide variety of different species.  The British National Memorial Arboretum is situated in the centre of England on Croxall Road, Alrewas in Staffordshire. It is easy to reach and is close to all the Midlands motorways.

*Stanley Kaye (known as The Poppy Man because he encourages us to plant poppies in remembrance) has a Facebook Group -

* https://www.facebook.com/groups/rememberingworldwarone

The 4 Flowers of Remembrance:

Flowers of Remembrance - Forget me Not
Poppy, Daisy and Cornflower

The Cornflower (Bleuet) is the remembrance flower of France,

The Daisy (Madeliefje/Marguerite) of Belgium, 

The Red Flanders Poppy (Coquelicot) is universal but the idea of using the poppy as a symbol of remembrance comes from American Poet Moina Belle Michael’s vow always to wear a red poppy in remembrance+ and

The Forget-me-Not of Germany (Vergiss-mein-nicht) 

Peter Van den Broeck tells us that The Forget-me-not is also the WW1 remembrance flower of the Armenian genocide ..... and for Newfoundland.

+ https://femalewarpoets.blogspot.com/2019/08/moina-belle-michael-1869-1944-american.html

Albert Bertrand Purdie (1888 - 1976) – British writer, poet and Catholic Church Minister

With grateful thanks to Chris Warren* for contacting me to tell me about Albert Purdie and for sending me a copy of two marvellous WW1-related books he has published:  “In Flanders Now: The War Poems of Father Albert Purdie 1915 - 1918” and “Somewhere in France: Letters written from the Front 1914 – 1918 by Jack Turner, MC, Croix de Guerre”.

Father Purdie
from Chris Warren's book

Albert Bertrand Purdie was born in Kensington, London, UK in 1888, the birth being registered in December of that year.  His parents were Arthur Purdie, and his wife, Wilhelmina Purdie, nee Kowertz, who was German.  They were married in Marleybone, London in 1883.  

According to Chris Warren in the Introduction to his reprint of Purdie's poetry collection, Albert was educated at St. Edmund's College, Old Hall, Ware, Hertfordshire, UK and became a Catholic Church Minister. He was ordained in 1914.   

During the First World War, Father Albert volunteered to serve as a military chaplain. His service record states that Father Albert served as a 3rd Class Chaplain to the Army Chaplain Corps* - with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on the Western Front.  Chris tells us in his introduction to the book of poems: “He went on to serve in Salonika and Constantinople and ended the war with an OBE for bravery.”  

*The Royal Army Chaplains Corps was established in Britain in 1796 in order to provide religious and pastoral support to soldiers belonging to the Church of England.  However, in 1836, following Catholic emancipation, the Department took on its first Roman Catholic clergy.

I wonder if Albert met Stanley Casson who also served in Salonika during WW1 and was also a poet?  Casson wrote a book about his experiences during the First World War, which include an extremely interesting account of his time in Salonika. “Steady Drummer” by Stanley Casson (G. Bell & Sons Ltd., London, 1935).

https://forgottenpoetsofww1.blogspot.com/2014/10/lieutenant-colonel-stanley-casson-1889.html  

In 1929, Father Albert was appointed Headmaster of St. Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire – one of England's oldest Catholic schools.   He died in Brighton, Sussex, UK on 30th May 1976. 

According to the entry for Purdie in Catherine Reilly’s book “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography”, Albert Perdie’s First World War collection of poems was entitled “Poems” and was published by Washbourne in 1918.

Chris Warren tells us that Albert served again during the Second World War, this time as Chaplain to an RAF camp in Bedfordshire. He retired to Goring-on-Sea, Sussex when he was sixty.

Extract from a letter home written in July 1915 by Chris’s Uncle Jack who was serving on the Western Front:  “… we dropped in to see Father Purdie at his billet. I like him much: he is one of the best-read men I have come across – also tallk, with a clean boyish face and gold-rimme glasses.  He is not more than 26: quotes Virgil, and is a personal friend of the Meynells and of the late Robert Hugh Benson.”  Jack Turner was an artist and he went on: “He talks of writing something for me to illustrate. I have already drawn him a lovely Spahi (frun Tunis) smiling at one of the girls I know here: she was amusing him for me.    He has also given me a jolly little “Garden of the Soul” (Lady Edmond Talbot’s gift to the Catholic soldiers) which is small but has all the offices in.”

Other books by Father Albert Bertrand Purdie

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/abs/latin-verse-inscriptions-albert-b-purdie-latin-verse-inscriptions-pp-203-london-christophers-1935-cloth-4s-6d/ECD8BD1053E2058808F8C5C4A5A16CD3

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Albert-B-Purdie/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AAlbert+B+Purdie

“Ploegsteert Wood” a poem by Albert B. Purdie

WHERE the wood catches the thrust

Of green slopes pricked with told,

And draws their gathered splendour

Into its bosom.  Where the fiery breath

Of summer suns is caught and silently

Rebuked to sweetness, where long avenues

Of whispering trees tell secrets to the birds

In England now:

Where love meets love

In some recess, where woodman’s axe

Has made a clearing, and the ground

Is woven flowers and moss – the trysting-place

Of all fair dreams of life,

In England now.

*     *     *     *     * 

Where the dood dips to the line

Of trenches grey in fading light,

And draws the gathered dead

Into its bosom. Where the fiery breath

Of angry war is slowly spent and stilled,

And nightingales sing songs of other days,

And poplars sigh old memories back again,

In Flanders now:

Where life meets Death,

And dwells with her, where soldier’s axe

Has made a clearing, and the ground

Is trampled flowers and moss – the trysting-place

Of all dark dreams of death,

In Flanders now.

Ploegstreert, May, 1915.  

From “In Flanders Now: The War Poems of Father Albert Purdie 1915 -  1918” – with an introduction about Father Purdie written by Chris Warren - edited and published by Chris Warren.

Ploegsteert Wood was a sector of the Western Front in Flanders during the First World War. Part of the Ypres Salient, “Plugstreet Wood” (as British troops called it) is located around the Belgian village of Ploegsteert, Wallonia.

After fierce fighting in late 1914 and early 1915, Ploegsteert Wood became a quiet sector where no major action took place. Units were sent here to recuperate and retrain after tough fighting elsewhere and before returning to take part in more active operations.  From January to May 1916, Winston Churchill served in the area as Commanding Officer (Lieutenant-Colonel) of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

Ploegsteert Wood, WW1

There are numerous Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries and memorials around the wood, including the Hyde Park Corner (Royal Berks) CWGC Cemetery and the Berks CWGC Cemetery Extension with the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing. The Ploegsteert Memorial commemorates more than 11,000 British and Empire servicemen who died during the First World War and have no known grave. It is one of several CWGC Memorials to the Missing along the Western Front. Those lost within the Ypres Salient without a known grave are commemorated at the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, while the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland are honoured on separate memorials.

Another poem about Ploegsteert Wood – entitled “Vilanelle” - was written by WW1 VAD and writer Vera Brittain’s fiancé – Roland Leighton - who was also a poet:   http://forgottenpoetsofww1.blogspot.com/2023/08/roland-aubrey-leighton-1895-1915.html

Sources:  Find my Past, Free BMD, messages from Chris Warren and his books - “In Flanders Now: The War Poems of Father Albert Purdie 1915 -  1918” and “Somewhere in France: Letters written from the Front 1914 – 1918 by Jack Turner, MC, Croix de Guerre”:  

Catherine W. Reilly "English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography" (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1978) - page 259 

https://derbyshireterritorials.uk/tag/ploegsteert-wood/

https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/royal-army-chaplains-department

Chris Warren’s wonderful books can be purchased by following these links:

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11285382-in-flanders-now

 

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9304624-somewhere-in-france

Roland Aubrey Leighton (1895 - 1915) – British soldier writer and poet

Roland Aubrey Leighton was born in Marylebone, London, UK in 1895 - the birth being registered in June of that year.  His parents were Robert Leighton, a writer of boys' adventure stories, and his wife, Marie Connor Leighton, nee Connor, also a writer, who were married in Maryletone in 1889.

Roland was educated at Uppingham School in Rutland, where he met Vera Brittain’s brother Edward Brittain. In 1913, Roland began courting Edward's sister, Vera and was awarded a scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford University in 1914

Abandoning his studies, Roland volunteered for service in the Army when war broke out, joining the Worcestershire Regiment and was posted to the Western Front.  

Roland and Vera became engaged on his first leave in August 1915. Roland wrote Vera letters from the Front, about British society, the war, the purpose of scholarship and aesthetics, as well as their relationship. She kept his letters in her diaries and mentioned them in later writings. Within his correspondence Roland also sent a number of poems.

On 23rd December 1915 Roland died of wounds in the Casualty Clearing Station at Louvencourt, France, having been shot through the stomach by a sniper while inspecting wire in the trenches at Hébuterne. He was 20 years old.  He was buried in LOUVENCOURT MILITARY CEMETERY, France,  Grave Reference: Plot 1. Row B. Grave 20. 

Sue Robinson of the Group Wenches in Trenches visits Roland’s grave when she takes members of the Group to France.  https://www.wenchesintrenches.org/

Photograph of Roland's grave by
Sue Robinson 

'Villanelle' poem written by Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain 

This poem is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford; © McMaster University, Mills Memorial Library, The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections

Violets from Plug Street Wood,

WW1 silk postcard

Sweet, I send you oversea.

(It is strange they should be blue,

Blue, when his soaked blood was red,

For they grew around his head:

It is strange they should be blue.)

Think what they have meant to me - 

Life and hope and Love and You

(and you did not see them grow

Where his mangled body lay

Hiding horrors from the day;

Sweetest, it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,

To your dear, far, forgetting land

These I send in memory

Knowing you will understand.

Ploegsteert Wood was a sector of the Western Front in Flanders during the First World War. Part of the Ypres Salient, “Plugstreet Wood” (as British troops called it) is located around the Belgian village of Ploegsteert, Wallonia.  

After fierce fighting in late 1914 and early 1915, Ploegsteert Wood became a quiet sector where no major action took place. Units were sent here to recuperate and retrain after tough fighting elsewhere and before returning to take part in more active operations.  From January to May 1916, Winston Churchill served in the area as Commanding Officer (Lieutenant-Colonel) of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

There are numerous Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries and memorials around the Wood, including the Hyde Park Corner (Royal Berks) CWGC Cemetery and the Berks CWGC Cemetery Extension with the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing. The Ploegsteert Memorial commemorates more than 11,000 British and Empire servicemen who died during the First World War and have no known grave. It is one of several CWGC Memorials to the Missing along the Western Front. Those lost within the Ypres Salient without a known grave are commemorated at the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, while the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland are honoured on separate memorials.

Sources:  Find my Past, Free BMD

https://derbyshireterritorials.uk/tag/ploegsteert-wood/

R.A.L

Hédauville, poem by Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain

The sunshine on the long white road

That ribboned down the hill,

The velvet clematis that clung

Around your window-sill

Are waiting for you still.

Again the shadowed pool shall break

In dimples at your feet,

And when the thrush sings in your wood,

Unknowing you may meet

Another stranger, Sweet.

Passion flower (Passiflora) in bloom December
2015

And if he is not quite so old

As the boy you used to know,

And less proud, too, and worthier,

You may not let him go - 

(And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)

It will be better so.

For more information: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/leighton

Alec Waugh (1898-1981) – British poet and writer

Born on 9th May 1898, Alexander Raban Waugh (known as Alec) in Chelsea, London, United Kingdom, Alec’s parents were Arthur Waugh, an author and publisher’s reader, and his wife, Catherine Charlotte Waugh, nee Raban. Alec’s mother was a Great-granddaughter of Lord Cockburn.  Alec was the elder brother of Evelyn Waugh who became a writer.

Lord Cockburn (1779 – 1854) was a Scottish lawyer, judge and literary figure. He served as Solicitor General for Scotland between 1830 and 1834.

Alec was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before going on to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. In 1914 Alec was awarded the English Verse Prize at Sherborne and one of his poems was accepted in August 1915 by the “Chronicle”.  Commissioned into the Dorset Regiment in May 1917, Alec served as a machine gunner on the Western Front. He was a Lieutenant when he was captured by the Germans near Arras in March 1918. Alec spent the remainder of the war in Prisoner-of-War (PoW) camps in Karlsruhe and Mainz.

Alec Waugh’s WW1 poetry collection was “Resentment: poems” (Grant Richards, London, 1918) and he had poems published in four WW1 Anthologies.

"Cannon Fodder" September 1917 By Alec Waugh

Is it seven days you've been lying there

Out in the cold,

Feeling the damp, chill circlet of flesh

Loosen its hold

On muscles and sinews and bones,

Feeling them slip

One from the other to hang, limp on the stones?

Seven days. The lice must be busy in your hair,

And by now the worms will have had their share

Of eyelid and lip.

Poor, lonely thing; is death really a sleep?

Or can you somewhere feel the vermin creep

Across your face

As you lie, rotting, uncared for in the unowned place,

That you fought so hard to keep

Blow after weakening blow.

Well. You've got what you wanted, that spot is yours

No one can take it from you now.

But at home by the fire, their faces aglow

With talking of you,

They'll be sitting, the folk that you loved,

And they will not know.

O Girl at the window combing your hair

Get back to your bed.

Your bright-limbed lover is lying out there

Dead.

O mother, sewing by candlelight,

Put away that stuff.

The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck.

He is warm enough.

Soon, like a snake in your honest home

The word will come.

And the light will suddenly go from it.

Day will be dumb. 

And the heart in each aching breast

Will be cold and numb.

O men, who had known his manhood and truth,

I had found him true.

O you, who had loved his laughter and youth,

I had loved it too.

O girl, who has lost the meaning of life,

I am lost as you.

And yet there is one worse thing,

For all the pain at the heart and the eye blurred and dim,

This you are spared,

You have not seen what death has made of him.

You have not seen the proud limbs mangled and

Broken,

The face of the lover sightless raw and red,

You have not seen the flock of vermin swarming

Over the newly dead.

Slowly he'll rot in the place where no man dare go,

Silently over the night the stench of his carcase will flow,

Proudly the worms will be banqueting...

This you can never know.

He will live in your dreams for ever as last you saw him.

Proud-eyed and clean, a man whom shame never knew,

Laughing, erect, with the strength of the wind in his manhood -

O broken-hearted mother, I envy you.

And here is another of Alec's WW1 poems:

From Albert to Bapaume

Lonely and bare and desolate,

Stretches of muddy filtered green,

A silence half articulate

Of all that those dumb eyes have seen.

A bettered trench, a tree with boughs

Smutted and black with smoke and fire,

A solitary ruined house,

A crumpled mass of rusty wire.

And scarlet by each ragged fen

Long scattered ranks of poppies lay,

As though the blood of the dead men

Had not been wholly washed away.

Alec Waugh’s book about his experience as a PoW is “The Prisoners of Mainz”, illustrated by British artist and fellow WW1 PoW R. T. Roussel (1883 – 1967). This is available on Gutenberg as an ebook https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/54203/pg54203-images.html

Sources, Find my Past, FreeBMD,

Catherine W. Reilly “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliogrphy” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) p. 331. 

https://allpoetry.com/From-Albert-to-Bapaume

https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar1/blog/poem/from-albert-to-bapaume/

https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar1/poets-and-poetry/alec-waugh/

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp35838/raphael-t-roussel

Photo of Alec Waugh in WW1 from  . 

https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en/noartistknown/alec-waugh/nomedium/asset/3757947

"Our Leading Lady" illustration by R.T. Roussel
from Alec's book about his PoW exerpeinces

R.T. Roussel (1883 – 1967) - British artist who designed and constructed dioramas. He was the son of Theodore Roussel, a French painter and etcher