Siegfried versus Ali

I do not, of course, refer to an imaginary boxing match between our hero and the recently-departed Muhammad Ali. Such a contest would be extremely one-sided, Siegfried's reach being of little assistance against the sheer speed and skill of such an opponent; he would be lucky if he lasted a round against the "Black Superman".

No, I was thinking more of a comparison between the two men as cultural icons who became serious political figures because of the moral stance they took in two very different wars. Many of you "baby boomers" reading this will still remember Cassius Clay, the young man who started boxing at the age of twelve, won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics and went on to become heavyweight champion of the world at twenty-two.  Those who do not remember "the greatest" in his heyday - or at all - may find it hard to understand why he was so widely admired and simultaneously reviled by different sections of society, especially in his US homeland.

He was born during the Second World War, one of five children, brought up a Baptist in the city of Louisville, Kentucky (hence he earned the nickname "The Louisville Lip", among many others). Even after being knocked to the floor in two of his early professional bouts - one of them with Britain's beloved Henry Cooper - he remained unbeaten and soon came up against the champion, Sonny Liston, a man with a criminal record and Mafia connections, who, some suspect, was using ointment on his gloves to temporarily blind his opponents. Clay fought through it to emerge victorious, and quickly established himself as a man with a big mouth, who defeated his opponents through a combination of outstanding physical prowess and psychology.

Like Sassoon - though at the same time quite unlike Sassoon - Clay was a poet. Prior to his match with Liston, he came up with a 14-line verse that culminated:

   "Yes, the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money, 

   That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny."

Before winning back his title from George Foreman in 1975, he claimed:

   "I can run through a hurricane and don't get wet.

   When George Foreman meets me,

    He'll pay off his debt."

Call it doggerel if you like, but can you name another boxer who would not have been ashamed to produce original verse?

Less than a year after winning the title, Clay shocked the world again by converting to Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Ali.  Following one of several successful defences of his title in 1967, it all came to an end, seemingly forever, when Ali was convicted of draft-dodging and sentenced to five years in prison. His explanation for his actions was quite simple:

"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father... Just take me to jail."

Despite this, he was denied the status of conscientious objector.  After a successful appeal in 1970, but having lost his licence to box, Ali had begun to take on the status of a popular hero.  Those who had found him arrogant and offensive in his youth saw that there was another side to him.  His refusal to fight began to win him popularity, especially among the younger generation, so that, by the time his conviction was overturned on appeal, many were disappointed to see him defeated, for the first time in his career, by Joe Frazier, whom Ali had dismissed as "too ugly to be champion".

But Ali bounced back.  In 1974, the 32-year-old won back his world title, and he managed to hold on to it for four years, despite several close calls. Sadly, his career lasted too long; he was still fighting, and losing, in 1980. It was then that he began to display the first tell-tale symptoms of Parkinson's Disease, which he would continue to battle for the next thirty-plus years.

Michael Parkinson, who interviewed Ali on British television several times, says that an appearance by Ali guaranteed his chat show an additional two million viewers, but at the same time admits that he didn't ever feel he had got to know the boxer properly.  Like most of us, he found it hard to tell when Ali was being serious and when he was playing a psychological game with his audience.

President Obama, on the other hand, is a long-time admirer and said that Ali "shook up the world" and "fought for us" (meaning America's black population).  "He spoke out when others wouldn't," added the president.

When you look at it that way, Ali is almost unique - a sportsman who had a much wider appeal than merely to sports fans. Call him an entertainer, call him a political activist, call him a philosopher-poet if you like. George Foreman said of their encounter, "Little did I know I would be facing something greater than a boxer."  How does one account for this level of popularity?

To compare Muhammad Ali with Siegfried Sassoon would be like comparing chalk with cheese.  One was brash and loud, the other diffident and self-effacing, but both were men of principle. Moreover, both were full of contradictions.  And both left an indelible mark on their times.

Other people's authors

Do the names James and Leo Walmsley mean anything to you? Don’t worry if they don’t; you’re in good company.  Representatives of the Walmsley Society (who were present in numbers at the Alliance of Literary Societies recent conference) are well used to having to explain who they were and what they did, just as I am in the case of Barbara Pym. It doesn’t mean that other people are ignorant, simply that they haven’t as yet been fortunate enough to have come across the work of these writers.  Those that do know them, however, may feel privileged to belong to an elite group.

I should think anyone who has been to Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire is likely to have come across the watercolours executed in the early 20th century by James Ulric Walmsley.  Originally an architect by profession, he lived in the area for sixty years but did not hit the big time until nearly the end of his life, when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy.  It is his son Leo, however, who interests me more.  A near-contemporary of Sassoon, Leo was two when his family moved to Robin Hood's Bay in 1894. During the First World War he joined the Royal Flying Corps and, like Sassoon, was awarded the Military Cross for his service in East Africa.

Leo was the literary half of the father-and-son partnership.  In the 1930s he began his popular "Bramblewick" series, and produced many more books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as an autobiography and a play. His books were popular with the general public and were read far beyond his home area. The Walmsley Society was launched in 1985, nearly twenty years after Leo's death - he did not live nearly as long a life as his father.  This makes it twice the age of the SSF, and its continued existence gives me great hope for the future.

Yes, the world is full of unknown authors who should be more famous.  There is no shame in not having heard of most of them (except, perhaps, in the case of a work colleague of mine who had never heard of the Bronte sisters and was only familiar with “Wuthering Heights” through Kate Bush’s song – and he didn’t even know the tune.  But he won’t be reading this blog.)  How many delights are lost to us through not having enough time to pick up every book in the library!  And how many great novels do we read purely by chance, even though their authors never become household names?  I can think of many I’ve picked up over the years, thinking, “I probably won’t like this, but I’ll give it a go”. We love to share our recommendations, don’t we? 

Sadly, the Charles Williams Society was not represented at this year's ALS conference, and I hear it is about to be wound up, which seems a terrible shame after so many years.  Williams was one of the Inklings (oops, nearly referred to them as the Inkspots, quite a different bunch of folk!)  The society now hopes to amalgamate with the thriving Oxford C S Lewis Society, which proclaims that it "is interested not as much in Lewis as a man as in the world he inhabited and the intellectual and spiritual colleagues he knew and admired", a statement which intrigues me more than somewhat.  If ever there was another writer whose connections make his life a window on his times, it is Siegfried Sassoon, and I've always thought that is a great advantage in attracting new members. 

The fact is, however, that C S Lewis has more than one society in his name.  California and New York each have their own, and then there is the "C S Lewis Society" - called simply that - which was founded at Princeton University in 1975, not to mention the C S Lewis Foundation, an educational charity.  A writer like Lewis, or Dickens, or Tolkien, or Jane Austen, can so dominate as to have thousands of members in his/her literary society while others go from year to year with a small core of loyal members. The Richard Jefferies Society, for example, has an international but still relatively small membership, yet it has been going since 1950, and appears not to be in any danger of meeting the same fate as the Charles Williams Society.

Victorian novelist Charlotte M Yonge also has an enduring presence in the world of literary societies, despite all the author's works being out of print. They still manage to hold two meetings a year and issue a newsletter. Other somewhat obscure authors with their own societies include 19th century Dorset poet, William Barnes (an influence on the much more famous Thomas Hardy), 20th century journalist and farmer Adrian Bell, 18th century poet Robert Bloomfield, travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabethan dramatist Fulke Greville, and Moonfleet author John Meade Falkner.  Put them all together and what have you got? An alliance to end all alliances, one which promises to outlive all conflict.

Bronte Country

If there is one novelist from the UK that everyone has heard of, it is probably Charlotte Brontë.  At least as famous as Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, Charlotte was welcomed into London literary circles by Dickens himself, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray and others, though she was notoriously shy and once spent an hour or so hiding from unexpected visitors behind a curtain in the Gaskell drawing room.  And if there is one thing everyone knows about Charlotte Brontë, it is that she had two sisters who were also writers and died young.  In fact, she had another two sisters who died as children – probably due to the lack of care given them by the Clergy Daughters' School where four of the five girls were sent. There was also a brother who drank himself to death, with the complication of various addictions.

It is a gloomy story by anyone’s standards, and Charlotte would compound the felony by dying in childbirth aged 38, when she was just embarking on a happy married life. Put them all together, however, and the Brontë sisters are an incredible phenomenon.  It is hard to think of another literary family who achieved so much in such a short period.  One of my favourite books as a child was Pauline Clarke’s Carnegie Medal-winning novel, The Twelve and the Genii, in which an 8-year-old boy stumbles across the Brontës’ box of toy soldiers, around which they wove fantasies that proved a catalyst for their careers as writers of fiction.  The "Genii" of the title are of course the Brontë children, of whom the soldiers have a distant memory.

Whatever the reason for their fame, the Brontë sisters have become almost synonymous with English literature and with the county of Yorkshire, where I have just been attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Literary Societies (which the SSF and WOA will be jointly hosting next year).  Haworth Parsonage was their family home, though it was not the sisters’ birthplace; they moved there from the village of Thornton (now subsumed by the metropolitan borough of Bradford) when Charlotte was aged about four.  In recognition of the 200^th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, the 2016 conference was hosted by the Brontë Society, about which there have been a number of unsympathetic media stories in recent times.  Is there such a thing as bad publicity for a literary society?  I don’t know but I would not like the SSF to suffer in the same way at the hands of the newspapers. 

On the other hand, it seems that the Brontë Society’s worst crime has been losing touch with the locals.  Apparently residents of Haworth do not feel a close connection with the Society’s aims and activities.  Here I can thoroughly sympathise, after experiences at Heytesbury and Matfield, where most of the locals welcomed the SSF with open arms but others seemed to see us as interlopers.  (Thinks: Why, oh why didn't I just leave it to them to start a literary society in honour of Sassoon?)  I can understand why it might appear so; to have strangers turning up who know little about your town or village except that a famous writer was born or died there could be annoying.  In the case of a place like Stratford-upon-Avon or Haworth, thronging with tourists throughout the summer months, there might be additional inconvenience involved, such as increased traffic, parking difficulties, noise, and the sheer congestion in the narrow streets. Matfield and Heytesbury would be very different places if they had the same cachet.

The "Bronte Village" at Haworth

Haworth as a community has changed considerably over the centuries.  Thanks largely to Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and perhaps also to the plot of Wuthering Heights, we have come to think of it as a remote village in a “wild” and “bleak” landscape, whereas in fact, by the time the family moved there, it was a thriving industrial town, with a larger population than it now has. It cannot be denied that the Yorkshire moors are a strange (though beautiful) landscape, in which one could easily lose one bearings and, failing modern communications, could end up like the toddler who followed his father out of the house during a snowstorm and whose death became the subject of a melodramatic contemporary poem. This was one of many literary efforts pouring forth from Haworth during the mid-19^th century that were enumerated by afternoon speaker Ian Dewhirst.

Some members of the Gaskell Society felt that Juliet Barker, in her excellent opening talk, was unjust to the Gaskell biography.  I don’t; she made it clear that she thinks it a wonderful book, and was not slow to point out that Gaskell had never written a biography before, which excuses some of the flights of fancy that affect its reputation but at the same time make it far more readable than most literary biographies. The proof of the pudding must be that, despite the sometimes uncomplimentary portrait of them painted by Gaskell, both the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Charlotte’s husband Arthur Bell Nichols went on to thank her unreservedly for the work she had done in rescuing Charlotte’s memory from popular misconceptions.

As usual, the dinner – held at the White Lion - was another opportunity for individual societies to advertise the wares of their respective authors by reading passages from their works.  So many wanted to do so that the ALS Chair, Linda Curry, was forced to draw names out of a hat in case we ran out of time. On this occasion, I eschewed the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in favour of an extract from Sassoon’s 1936 letter to Max Beerbohm, describing events at Heytesbury during the abdication crisis.  I sensed that some of the references in this very funny passage were going over many people’s heads - but at least no one appeared to be asleep.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me about the ALS is how many of its member societies are for authors I've never heard of - and I think of myself as well-read.  I intend to follow up on this comment in the next post.

Small Latin and Less Greek

While watching one of the many recent television programmes about the Bard of Avon, I was amused to hear a historian mention how the BBC had celebrated the “tercentenary” of Shakespeare’s birth.  The BBC is a venerable institution, but would have to be a lot older than it is to have been able to do that, since the tercentenary occurred in 1864.  What she was talking about was the “quatercentenary”, which I remember quite well myself, purely because I found the word rather troubling; surely, I thought, it should have another “r” in it?  I was only eight years old then, and had not learned any Latin.

The historian’s inability to cope with long words that are virtually never used nowadays reflected her youth.  She presumably did not study Latin at school, or she would certainly have been able to make an educated guess at the meaning of “tercentenary”, even if she had never come across the word before.  Shakespeare himself would, of course, have learned Latin at grammar school, and we even know the name of his teacher – Thomas Jenkins, a Welshman. 

It seems, though, that Shakespeare was not much of a Latin scholar.  He certainly used Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives as the basis of his play Julius Caesar.   Latin was not essential for reading most of the works from which he drew the plots of his plays.  His friend Ben Jonson wrote that he had “small Latin and less Greek”, and in Julius Caesar we find the first-ever published use of the phrase “it was Greek to me”. Had he been a more accomplished classical scholar, Shakespeare might have been drawn into using classical dramatic conventions in the manner of a Racine or Corneille long before he finally observed the unities of time and place in one of his last plays, The Tempest.  

Shakespeare belongs firmly in the world of the Elizabethan actor, an itinerant worker with no practical skills to his name. His companions were men like Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, John Heminges and Will Kempe. They came from lower and middle-class backgrounds and would have been moderately well-educated but had not been to university.  They were usually well-travelled. If they were in the service of the monarch or another important person, they might also be well-paid.  Some of the playwrights of the age were better educated: Christopher Marlowe was a Cambridge graduate (though it did not mean quite the same as it does now) and Ben Jonson himself, though from humble beginnings, won a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster School. 

Shakespeare’s lack of Latin, as evinced by his preference for alternative sources for the plays he wrote, indicates that he did not belong to the nobility, but I will avoid getting into the Shakespeare authorship “question” (if there really is a question).  Latin continued to be the language of choice for serious writers for centuries to come, Isaac Newton famously using it for his scientific treatises.  Others who wrote mainly in Latin included the philosophers René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. Even poetry and drama continued to be written in Latin, partly with the intention of it reaching an international audience.

By the early twentieth century, most public schoolboys and even grammar school boys had a good grounding in the Classics and it influenced their writing.  We've discussed this before, so we need not go into the details here. What is interesting about Siegfried Sassoon is that he, like Shakespeare, wrote his most effective poetry when he found the level of the average person, like the soldiers he found under his command in the First World War.  You could almost say that he "dumbed down" his writing to suit them.  In the sixteenth century, that would be considered no bad thing.  Medieval writers had a duty to appeal to the lowest common denominator because this enabled them to spread their work amongst the largest possible number of people, in the days before printing found its way to Britain and when illiteracy was still commonplace.  It did not do Shakespeare's work any harm. His "universality" is the thing we most admire about him, and I think that is also true of Sassoon.

Grief Observed

I’m imagining a big variety show going on in Heaven.  The compere is Terry Wogan, and Pierre Boulez conducts the orchestra in an overture of his own composition. The first half consists of a Victoria Wood special, with Ronnie Corbett, Alan Rickman, Frank Finlay, Gareth Thomas and Sheila Sim all taking cameo roles in “Acorn Antiques”, with a script co-written by Arnold Wesker.  Following the interval, during which Howard Marks serves drinks and nibbles (with assistance from Johann Cruyff), Paul Daniels does a set, giving way to Percy Sledge and Merle Haggard, who each do a couple of numbers arranged by Sir George Martin.  Joint top of the bill are Bowie and Prince with their band featuring Keith Emerson on keyboards and Black on backing vocals. The whole show is produced by Robert Stigwood.

People do die.  The swathe of “celebrity” deaths in the first four months of 2016 has attracted comment, but it’s not that unprecedented. It's just that the news gets out more quickly these days, and nothing much goes unreported. Looking back to 1963, two giants of the literary world, CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley, both died on the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas; consequently their deaths went almost unnoticed by the world’s media.  Likewise, the death earlier this year of novelist Anita Brookner had passed me by; I have read half a dozen of her books. 

Brookner, an art historian by discipline, did not begin her career in writing fiction until she was in her fifties. Her parents were Polish Jews, real name Bruckner which (ironically) they changed during the First World War because of anti-German feeling.  Many of her books deal with people in her own situation – people from Jewish backgrounds, often caring for elderly relatives.  I am sorry that there won't be any more.

I read an interesting article about how celebrity deaths affect the lives of their fans.  In many cases, they feel as if they have lost a family member. This is perhaps more understandable in the case of actors and musicians, now that the mass media has brought them closer to us and enabled “ordinary” people to become familiar with the appearances, voices, mannerisms and even the personal lives of those they admire.  With writers, I think, it is the recognition of a “voice” that chimes with the reader’s own feelings, as the voices of Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and other writers do with mine.  If the writer is very skilful, he or she can take on another voice, putting him- or herself into the place of a person who is really nothing like them.  People are often disappointed when they meet their idols face to face and they realise that the actor is not the same as the fictional character they portray on screen (or in print).

Sometimes, or so I gather, a celebrity death can become confused in a person’s mind with a personal loss.  For example, one woman who had recently lost her grandfather without displaying any great outward emotion, found herself devastated by the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2014. Other people often find such reactions inexplicable and even laugh at those who experience them.  Columnist and rock drummer Tim Thornton sensibly asks: “What damage does it do to anyone else if someone is waxing lyrical in a slightly embarrassing manner?” The repression of emotion is often associated with being British, and an opposite tendency is one of the things we look down on “foreigners” for.   There is a widespread suspicion that giving vent to such feelings is a sign of immaturity and/or lack of self-discipline.

Wartime is when the “stiff upper lip” shows itself most clearly.  During the Blitz, ordinary Londoners got on with their lives, with a minimum of grumbling.  Many must have felt they could not afford to show strong emotion, as they needed all their energy to care for their families, and sometimes simply to survive.  Repression of emotion is not always good, however, as Sassoon learned from Rivers.

Although mass hysteria may not be desirable, it does sometimes result from a genuine wave of public feeling. I cannot imagine any admirer of Victoria Wood becoming involved in the kind of scenes that took place at the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 (can it really be more than a quarter of a century ago?) but perhaps the occasion fulfilled a need for his followers to vent their feelings. Violence is not normally the British way, though.

The media, who are so often responsible for stirring up trouble where there was none, have long been a problem for those attempting to grieve privately.  At Thomas Hardy's star-studded funeral in Westminster Abbey - far from the quiet family occasion Hardy wanted for himself - Sassoon was too distressed to sit in the front-row seat reserved for him, and never forgave Humbert Wolfe for the way he used the occasion to publicise himself and almost immediately turned on Hardy by publishing criticisms of his poetry.  At T E Lawrence's funeral a few years later, Sassoon physically assaulted a would-be photographer at the graveside. "Let me have my feelings to myself," he wrote in his diary, unwilling to share his grief even with his wife.

The Snowball Effect

While strolling along Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury on Saturday last, looking for a likely place to enjoy a leisurely coffee before The Lamb opened its doors at 12 noon, it crossed my mind that I might bump into Cynthia Greenwood.  This has happened on several previous occasions, as Cynthia and I seem to have a mysterious empathy when a desire for liquid refreshment strikes us.

Standing on the corner (not, as far as I know, watching all the girls go by), was that doyen of the War Poets Association, David Worthington, who informed me that he was awaiting the arrival of two friends, who were late for their appointment.  It was just then that one of these much-maligned friends greeted David from the doorway of the cafe (they had been awaiting him within while he enjoyed some spring sunshine at an outside table). True to form, who should be sitting at the next table but Cynthia?

Before long, another member had been waylaid on his way to The Lamb, and the snowball effect was beginning to be noticeable. It struck me that this is an effect well illustrated by the growth in SSF membership (and no doubt the growth of many other literary societies). A member once commented to me that "once you start coming to these things, you can't stop." Addictive, this literature business.

It certainly seems to be the case with The Lamb.  For those of you who wonder why we are still holding meetings in the upstairs room of a pub with limited space (and I'm asked as regularly as clockwork), the answer is that affordable venues in London are not easy to come by. This is not our annual conference, and it is priced accordingly. It was conceived as a cheap and cheerful members-only event, and demand sometimes exceeds supply, but we usually manage to squeeze everyone in somehow.  Moreover, we nearly always have attendees who have never been to a WOA or SSF meeting before, which is remarkable.

So, if you are thinking "maybe next year", what can you expect to find on your arrival?  I cannot deny that there will be quite a few people milling around trying to find seats.  If you are having lunch, I cannot guarantee when your meal will come out of the kitchen (relative to everyone else's) but I can guarantee that it will be worth waiting for when it does.  I can also promise that there will be a lot of noise - it generally takes twenty seconds or so before the whole room becomes aware that the Chair is trying to speak.  You can, however, be sure that what comes out of her mouth will be sensible.

You can look forward to hearing good speakers, and the variety of subject matter is notable.  Men and women from various backgrounds, both academic and "ordinary", have addressed the group in recent years, on topics ranging from the influence of the classics on poets of the First World War to the nefarious activities of Siegfried Sassoon's lover Stephen Tennant.  This year, Dr Paul Norgate and sculptor Anthony Padgett kept us entertained and interested for a couple of hours, and we rounded off the meeting with a few drinks in the downstairs bar.

At this point, you may be expecting me to tell you about the talks we heard at The Lamb on 2nd April.  However, if you are a member of either the WOA or SSF, you will be able to read all about these in the next edition of Siegfried's Journal.  If, on the other hand, you are not yet a member... You know, you really should join us.

Easter Rising

I happened to be in Ireland last week, and, as every schoolchild probably knows by now, 2016 is the centenary of the Easter Rising.  The taxi driver with whom I discussed it was of the opinion that "people need to be careful when they stir up nationalist feeling".  His concern was that the hundredth anniversary of the event might have a similar long-term effect to the fiftieth anniversary in 1966, when Irish Republicans famously blew up Nelson's Pillar, a relic of colonial rule that stood in the middle of O'Connell Street, just across from the General Post Office which had been the rebels' HQ during the Easter Rising.

What many people do not realise is that repeated attempts had been made by the Irish government to remove the Pillar; they were thwarted by the terms of a trust that had existed since it was first erected in 1808.  Legal attempts to obtain permission to demolish it had failed.  To be fair, a few Irish people actually liked it; James Joyce and W B Yeats who wanted it to be preserved.  In general, though, it was an anachronism whose destruction was not greatly regretted.

Prior to the explosion, during the 1950s, the Irish government gave brief consideration to replacing the statue of Nelson with one of Patrick Pearse, the poet and schoolteacher who read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the GPO on the first day of the Easter Rising. The most articulate of the rebels, he gave them a voice, and this led inevitably to his execution in May 1916.  In death, he became the most famous and most missed of the leaders of the rising, his name being given to buildings, streets, parks, sports clubs and stations, while his face appeared on coins and stamps after Ireland's independence was finally achieved.  

Pearse's body was buried at Arbour Hill Military Cemetery in Dublin, after being transported from Kilmainham Gaol where he was shot by a firing squad, along with his younger brother Willie and other republican leaders.  The British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, had been warned not to return the rebels' remains to their families for fear of their graves becoming martyrs' shrines.  Pearse's mother and sister went on to become members of the Irish Parliament, whilst he and his companions acquired martyr status without too much difficulty.

One of those shot in company with Pearse was Thomas MacDonagh, a poet and playwright from Tipperary who taught with him at St Enda's School, where efforts were being made to keep the Irish language  alive. Despite the association, MacDonagh was a late recruit to the elite group of educated men who masterminded the  Easter Rising.  Tragically, his widow would die in a drowning accident a year after his execution; their legacy was their son, Donagh MacDonagh, brought up by an aunt to become both an accomplished writer and, at 29, the youngest person ever appointed to the Irish judiciary.

While the Easter Rising was taking place, thousands of Irishmen, of various religious and political persuasions, were fighting with the British forces against Germany.  Three days after the rising in Dublin, German gas attacks at Hulluch began, resulting in over 400 deaths among the 16th (Irish) Division.  Meanwhile, the poet Francis Ledwidge, a nationalist from County Meath, was on leave after being injured on active service in Serbia.  The news of the rising and its aftermath were devastating; he overstayed his leave and was later charged with being drunk in uniform; Ledwidge began once again to question his position, having already searched his conscience carefully before making the decision to enlist.

Some of Patrick Pearse's poetry in support of the Irish republican cause could so easily have been written about the First World War.  After the Easter Rising, however, with Pearse no longer around, Ledwidge was one of those who briefly filled his place, producing a "Lament for the Poets".  A close friend of MacDonagh, Ledwidge also produced a "Lament for Thomas MacDonagh", which takes on a less militant and more personal note. A year later, Ledwidge himself would be dead, the victim of a random shell explosion as he stood in a ditch, near Ypres, with a mug of tea in his hand. He died on the same day as the Welsh-language poet Ellis Evans (better known by his bardic name of "Hedd Wyn"), who was fatally wounded in action and is buried just a hundred yards away from Ledwidge. Members of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship visited both of their graves during our visit to Ypres in October 2010 and paid tribute to these much-lamented Celtic war poets.

 .