W War Poets

War Poets

Several former pupils of the College who enlisted as soldiers during the First World War became nationally acclaimed for their poetical responses to the conflict and the moral questions it raised.

The best known of them remains Siegfried Sassoon (1887–1967), the son of a Jewish-Iraqi father and Anglo-Catholic mother, and a pupil in Cotton House between 1902 and 1905. He joined the Welch Fusiliers in 1915 and earned from his comrades the sobriquet ‘Mad Jack’ on account of his reckless courage. He later became an outspoken critic of the war and its jingoism, and poetry provided an outlet for his disillusion. He submitted poems singly to periodicals and magazines before publishing the little-noticed collections Does it Matter? and

The Old Huntsman (both 1917), and Counter-Attack and Other

Poems (1918). His work only reached a wider audience in the late 1920s, but by then Sassoon had turned to other subjects, particularly country pursuits. In the early 1930s, he settled at Heytesbury House in south Wiltshire. We have at the College several signed works by Sassoon, including a first edition of his 1928 novel, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

Better known during the War was the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed aged only 20 in 1915. The son of a professor at the University of Aberdeen, Sorley came to Marlborough in 1908 as a boarder in C1. A convinced Germanophile, he enrolled for a year’s study at the University of Jena prior to taking up a scholarship at Oxford, but the outbreak of war put an end to his academic dreams. Due to the weight of casualties, Sorley was rapidly promoted to Captain in the Suffolk Regiment, and was shot leading his men at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. His poems were published by Cambridge University Press early in 1916 under the title Marlborough and Other Poems, and became an immediate bestseller, reprinted seven times between 1916 and 1919.

The least well-known of Marlborough’s war poets is Alec de Candole, a pupil in C3 between 1911 and 1916. A prize-winning student at Marlborough, De Candole intended to study Theology at Cambridge before taking Holy Orders, but with war raging in Europe, he enlisted with the Fourth Wiltshire Regiment in 1916. De Candole was only 21 when he met his death in France during a bombing raid in September

1918, a few weeks short of the Armistice. His poems were first brought to public attention through small publications sponsored by his grieving father; later, in 1919, Cambridge University Press published his Poems, a collection of work written at Marlborough and during his time in uniform. The College possesses the personal copy that once belonged to Helen Edith de Candole, Alec’s mother. In 2020, a Shell student working on a research task in the Memorial Library unearthed an unpublished manuscript poem by Alec de Candole tucked between its leaves. Written on tissue-thin paper, the poem, seemingly transcribed in his mother’s hand and dated 1916, now resides in the Rare Books collection alongside Alec’s books.