Saturday 7 August 2021

Mr Hardy, the Dearmer family, and Lord Derby

The first and only time I met the late Robert Hardy, our briefest of conversations turned on a poet who had celebrated his 100th birthday in 1993. Mr Hardy had been present at the attendant celebration and happened to be talking about it just as I came into the room. Geoffrey Dearmer had been the last surviving First World War poet "proper", which immediately aroused my interest.

    Not many people, even those who are interested in the literature of the First World War, seem to have heard of Geoffrey Dearmer. Perhaps living to be 103 was a disadvantage in terms of notoriety. I've noticed over the years how those who died young (Burns, Keats, Shelley, Owen, to name but a few) tend to eclipse their longer-lived contemporaries, largely because there isn't time for the public to become bored with them and their work. Sassoon and Graves both produced enough quality work in middle age to continue to be revered in the long term, even though they may not have received much attention in the last couple of decades of their lives.

    Dearmer is not generally considered to have been in the Sassoon or Graves class as a poet, or indeed a rival to Wilfred Owen, who was just three days his senior. His best-known poem, "The Turkish Trench-Dog", is a curious precursor of Rosenberg's more famous queer sardonic rat from "Break of Day in the Trenches". But Dearmer had more in common with Sassoon than is immediately obvious. On 6 October 1915, Geoffrey Dearmer's younger brother, Christopher, died of wounds on board the troop ship Gloucester Castle, of wounds incurred at Suvla Bay.   On 1 November 1915, Siegfried Sassoon's younger brother, Hamo, died of wounds on board the troop ship Kildonan Castle, of wounds incurred at Suvla Bay.  

    Geoffrey Dearmer, unlike his more famous contemporary Sassoon, never wanted to go to war. His father was a clergyman, his mother an artist, writer and committed pacifist. Perhaps Geoffrey would have chosen to be a conscientious objector were it not for the fact that both parents volunteered to serve - the Rev Percy Dearmer as a chaplain and Mabel as a nursing orderly. Their sons followed their lead, believing that they should "do their bit" regardless of their personal preferences. Tragedy came soon after, with Mabel Dearmer developing enteric fever while nursing in Serbia and dying of pneumonia in July 1915, shortly after returning home. When her younger son also died, it must have been a serious blow to Geoffrey's father, and will have had a lasting impact on Geoffrey himself.

    From a recent article in the Western Front Association's Stand To! magazine I learned that the military files of certain individuals were preserved for posterity in the National Archives because of their activities in civilian life. Sassoon was apparently not one of these, but Robert Graves was, and so was Geoffrey Dearmer. The records contained in the latter's file reveal what happened next. Stephen Gwynn, an Irish Nationalist MP who served as a captain in the British Army and was a friend of Mabel's, wrote to the infamous Lord Derby in 1917 to appeal for Geoffrey, who was at that time in the Army Service Corps, to be kept out of the front line, in deference to a "very sensitive nature" that made him unsuited for the infantry. Three weeks later, Geoffrey was ordered back to the UK.

    Gwynn had commented that the young man was "more likely to become a great poet than any young writer of his day".  Perhaps Dearmer did not quite achieve that, but he certainly lived a long and interesting life, going on to work for the Lord Chamberlain's Office as an "Examiner of Plays", responsible for upholding standards in the theatre, and later worked for the BBC, where he had a hand in the radio series, Children's Hour, of which many of you will still have happy memories.  

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