Tumult and Tears
Page 23
The response was overwhelming; poems flooded in from across the English-speaking world. Letters often accompanied the submission and these provide a fascinating background to the poet, the poem’s composition and the universality of poetry. One mother admitted that she had written and sent her son a poem every day during the time he was overseas. Other writers alluded to personal and financial hardship now being endured; more than one impoverished war widow hoped to receive some small remuneration for her poem. Frustratingly, Powell left no record of his criteria for selecting the poems he retained, or any indication of whether compassion influenced his choice, but he was undoubtedly gender blind.
At the same time as collecting and collating the handwritten poems which run to four large scrapbooks, Powell became the beneficiary of ‘The War Poetry Collection’, consisting of 1,233 printed volumes written by canonised poets, by unknown soldiers, by civilians and by women. These were donated in 1921 by William John Cross (about whom nothing further is known) in memory of Private William John Billington, the son of a Birmingham cabinet maker born in 1897. The young soldier served with the London Regiment in France, Salonika and Egypt and was killed in action, in Palestine in 1918. Placed alongside the handwritten poems, the collection of printed volumes, which Powell continued to add to through donations and purchases, grew over many decades.
The jewel in the crown of the Birmingham collection is the ‘scrapbook collection’. As well as the four scrapbooks containing the responses to Powell’s requests, there are five compiled by a Gladys Perhson, two scrapbooks which form the Lawrence Levy bequest and finally forty-four huge volumes entitled
A Collection of Poems Relating to the European War 1914-1918 from Newspapers, Magazines etc. All the scrapbooks present the researcher with problems but none more so than the forty-four volume set. The volumes are un-paginated but in total run to over 3,000 pages, often with up to ten poems pasted on each page. The particular challenges they present relate to the quantity and legibility of the poems, as well as the sheer number of volumes. Clippings are undated and unattributed. Sometimes a poem appears under the poet’s initials in one publication, anonymously or their full name is given in another. It is often impossible to know if the cutting is duplicated or from a different publication and, with the passing of time, there are now significant preservation issues. Old glue and ‘crinkly’ paper make reading some poems frustratingly hard and occasionally the compiler cut off the end of or even an entire line.
What becomes obvious on even a superficial glance through the material is that once again, the gender of the poet was irrelevant. In a poem published in The Egoist (December 1914), Herbert Blenheim ruefully declared, ‘At the sound of the drum/Oh Tommy, they’ve all begun to strum.’ Just occasionally, when grappling with these scrapbooks, even the most enthusiastic researcher is forced to admit that they wish the strumming had been more restrained.
The volumes of poetry, the preserved letters, and, perhaps above all, the scrapbooks that flooded in to Birmingham in response to Powell’s appeal (which continued into the early 1920s) demonstrate that this was and has remained the most literary war ever fought. It was fought not primarily by the intelligentsia but by very ordinary men and women, such as Cadbury’s employee Elsie Mewis, who told Walter Powell that although she was ‘only a factory worker’ she had written and sold poems to benefit ‘our Tommies [and] Belgian refugees’. She shared with him her pride in having been able to ‘help a little’ in her country’s ‘hour of need’.
Elsie was perhaps less aware that her poems and those of the hundreds of other women who expressed in verse their hopes, fears, excitement, grief and despair over four long years were inadvertently creating an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s war, women’s lives and women’s history.