The Thread that Binds Them

Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten the sub-editor changing the phrase to ‘other people’s flowers’. I had fool­ishly imagined that, even if my readers did not know Montaigne – ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own’ – they would at least recognize the play on the title of one of the great poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. Some hope.

Other Men’s Flowers (1944) is a deeply personal anthology com­piled by Archibald Percival Wavell, otherwise known as Field Marshal Earl Wavell, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, MC. We have on our shelves a copy of the attractively produced ‘memorial edition’, put together two years after his death in 1950, with an introduction by his son, also Archibald. Our volume has an inscription on the flyleaf, which was written by my brother to my husband, and was given to him as a present for acting as an usher at his wedding in 1977. I can­not imagine many young men giving this anthology as a present these days, although I am mighty glad my brother did. Field Marshal Wavell was a remarkable man. Those letters after his name tell the tale succinctly: Order of the Bath; Grand Commander of the Star of India; Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George; Military Cross. Born in 1883, the son of a soldier, he gained a scholarship to Winchester College – then, as now, one of the brain­iest public schools in the country – and went on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He joined the Black Watch and served with dis­tinction in both the Second Boer War and the Great War, gaining the Military Cross but losing an eye during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Much of his army career, however, was spent as a staff officer, and his exceptional capabilities of brain and personality made him a very successful one. (He understood well the mutual incomprehen­sion that has always existed between staff and regimental officers; he included in his anthology Hotspur’s deeply unflattering account of a ‘popinjay’, a staff officer in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I.) Wavell was given a variety of military jobs between the wars and then, in the summer of 1939, he was made up to a full general when he became GOC Middle East Command, later becoming Commander-in-Chief India, with the task of facing the Japanese threat after Pearl Harbor. He was appointed Viceroy of India towards the end of 1943, at a time of great difficulties, but was sacked by Winston Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, in 1947, just before Independence, being replaced by a lesser man, Earl Mountbatten. He died three years later and is buried in the cloister garth at Winchester College. Despite the extreme pressures under which he laboured during the Second World War, Wavell managed to put together Other Men’s Flowers, which was published by Jonathan Cape. (It is much to the credit of the publishers that they brought the book out in wartime, but it was a shrewd move, for Other Men’s Flowers was an immediate success and was to be found in many a kitbag taken across to France on D-Day.) Wavell’s son wrote in the introduction to the 1952 memorial edition:

In the brief respite of six months between staving off the German assault on the Middle East in the Spring of 1941, and turning to meet the challenge of Japan at the end of the year, my father found time to list his favourite poems and explain his choice in the prefaces to each section. The family all made their suggestions, and we reminded him of poems we knew he loved but had forgotten to include: the poems that we heard read to us as children . . . So it all began as an idea for a family conver­sation but we gradually prevailed upon him to let the world join in, and the literary members of his Staff nurtured the con­spiracy with the publishers.

An influential member of that Staff was Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Fleming, the travel writer and adventurer. Brother of Ian Fleming and husband of the actress Celia Johnson, he was author of Travels in Tartary, also published by Cape. There is something rather wonderful about the C-in-C India talking poetry with his subordinates in the middle of a war that at the time the Allies were at grave risk of losing. Yet even without the anthology, Lord Wavell confounds conventional expectations about the bluff military man only interested in war. He explained in the introduction to the first edition that he had always read poetry

and since I had once a very retentive memory for verse much has remained in my head . . . I ask no one to applaud my choice. I do not always applaud it myself, but a part of me from which I cannot dissociate myself, my memory, has made this selection and I am too old to alter it. On the whole I think it is a reasonable choice from the almost inexhaustible treasure of English poetry, for a workaday man who prefers plain gold, silver or metal work to elaborate jewellery.

Hardly ‘workaday’. The selections are arranged by theme: ‘Music, Mystery and Magic’, ‘Love and All That’, ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘The Lighter Side’ and so on. The collection is heavy with Rudyard Kipling, Lord Macaulay, G. K. Chesterton and Sir Walter Scott, as you would expect, but there is much Robert Browning as well. George Herbert and James Shirley find a place but he does not seem to have loved either Wordsworth or Tennyson enough to include them. Where you do find a predictable poet, the poem chosen is often not the most obvious one: no ‘Goblin Market’ from Christina Rossetti, no ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ from W. B. Yeats. With the exception of poems by John Masefield, Walter de la Mare and A. E. Housman, there is little or nothing written after the Great War. As well as introductions to each chapter, there are short notes to some of the entries. These add much to the appeal of the collection, for they often explain why he liked a particular poem or they clear up some mystery for his readers. Occasionally, they are very poign­ant. After Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Dead’ (you know the one, ‘. . . Dawn was theirs,/ And sunset, and the colours of the earth’) Wavell noted: ‘I can well remember Lord Allenby repeating this poem to me shortly after he had heard the news that his only son, a boy of great promise, had been killed in action.’ Wavell comes across as a humane and sensitive man. (He also had an excellent sense of humour. I particu­larly enjoyed the fragment of parody of ‘If’ that he quotes: ‘If you can keep your girl while all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you . . .’) Some choices may strike a contemporary readership as a little strange. For example, there are two Julian Grenfell poems but noth­ing by Wilfred Owen. But Wavell never claimed that this was a comprehensive tour d’horizon. He wasn’t trying to flatter some unknown audience or pursue any particular fashion or vogue. He was simply pleasing himself, recalling the poetry that he had first read and learned by heart in youth; in doing so, he has pleased every gen­eration since 1944, for this book has never gone out of print. From the touching and thoughtful introduction in our memorial edition, it is also clear that his son had obviously inherited his father’s highly tuned sensibilities. He wrote that poetry mitigated his father’s disappointment in 1947. Archibald fils confessed to liking rather more modern verse than his father did, including poets that don’t find any place here, such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. A commis­sioned officer himself, he died the following year (1953) on active service in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising. And thus did the earldom of Wavell become extinct. Field Marshal Wavell wrote in his introduction, in New Delhi in April 1943: ‘My experience is that one can never properly appreciate a poem until one has got it by heart: memory stumbles over a word or a line and so wonders why the poet wrote it so, and then savours it slowly that its meaning and relish may stay.’ He admitted to declaiming poetry on his daily horse-ride. These days, the lack of encouragement to schoolchildren to learn any poetry by heart means that a vast world of delight, fascination, wisdom and enjoyment is denied them – probably for their lifetimes. How could recent gener­ations have let their young down so badly? This is one area of life that our forebears understood so much better than us. I know how diffi­cult it is to learn a new poem after the age of 60, yet how much I should like to be able to declaim more of the verse I love when walk­ing the dog each day. If you read Other Men’s Flowers, I hope that you will conclude, as I did, that the wonderful heritage of poetry in English contributed to the making of an eminently civilized man, and both consoled and encouraged him in some pretty dark days.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Ursula Buchan 2022