Re: The POW Poet

Date: June 12, 2004

"Scotland's forgotten war poet
SUSAN MANSFIELD

The Mother
‘Mother o’ Mine; O Mother o’ Mine.’
My mother rose from her grave last night,
And bent above my bed,
And laid a warm kiss on my lips,
A cool hand on my head;
And, ‘Come to me, and come to me,
My Bonnie boy,’ she said.
And when they found him at the dawn,
His brow with blood defiled,
And gently laid him in the earth
They wondered that he smiled.

BOB BURROWS was clearing out his late mother’s house when he found a small brown book. Though it was sepia-tinted with age, he could just make out the title: Ballads of Battle by Sergeant Joe Lee of the Black Watch, illustrated with his own sketches, published in 1916. Instead of throwing it into a box bound for a charity shop, he started to flick through it. "I was fascinated by the sketches, then I started to read the poetry. I got carried away. I’m not a great poetry fan but I was really moved by it."

Burrows decided to find out more about Sergeant Joe Lee, but it was harder than he had expected. A pile of literary reference books at his local library yielded not a mention of the Scottish soldier who had brought the battlefields of the First World War so vividly to life. Burrows, a retired banker from Macclesfield, was both frustrated and intrigued. Who was this man who wrote so movingly yet seemed to have slipped from the pages of history?

His five-year quest for Joe Lee has uncovered a remarkable story. A working-class man from Dundee who travelled the world and was a noted journalist, poet and artist. A brave soldier and a fine poet whose work was anthologised alongside Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. A man who survived the trenches to marry his sweetheart and counted many of the celebrities of 1930s London among his friends.

Burrows hopes his biography of Lee, Fighter Writer, which also publishes some of his poetry and sketches for the first time in more than 50 years, will bring the "Black Watch poet" the recognition which is long overdue. "I honestly believe he is as important as Owen and Sassoon. Experts say that they brought the horrors of war to the attention of the public, but Lee was doing that as early as 1916. He should be up there with the best of them."

Perhaps one reason why Lee escaped recognition was his working-class background. Born in 1876 in a tenement in the Wellgate area of Dundee, he was one of nine children. His father, David, worked in a draper’s shop. Lee, though clearly bright, had to leave school at 14 to take a job in a lawyer’s office. A few years later, seeking wider horizons, he boarded a steamer bound for the Black Sea. From there he travelled through Europe and across Canada, his sketchbook his constant companion. On his return, he found work in London as a journalist, critic and cartoonist, before returning to Dundee to work with the newspaper company John Leng & Co, where he became editor of the People’s Journal. He was well known in the town as a journalist and artist, and had his first play performed by students from the art college in 1914.

By then Europe was falling under the shadow of war, and the Black Watch was forming a 4th Battalion in Dundee. Few expected Lee - who had suffered from asthma all his life and was by now 39 with an established career - to volunteer, but he did. When asked his age he reportedly said: "Mind your own bloody business and just give me my kilt." Burrows says: "He was a restless man, he liked to travel. I suspect that at 38 or 39 he hadn’t found romance. He had no ties and a lot of his young colleagues were joining up. This was his last big adventure."

He was one of nine "Fighter Writers" from the same publishing house who went to the trenches. While his good friends Linton Andrews and Jack Beveridge Nicholson sent back journalistic dispatches, Lee wrote only poetry, which he sent to Dundee for publication in the local papers. And, as always, he sketched.

By all accounts he was a brave soldier. He, Andrews and Nicholson undertook a daring rescue mission, saving two injured men from the battlefield in the teeth of enemy fire. Andrews described him as "the best loved man in the Battalion, apart from Colonel Walker, good hearted, would do anything for a comrade, keeps morale high and civilised standards irrespective of the stench of death".

Nevertheless the stench of death was tangible. The horror of war was brought home to the men forcibly when Nicholson was shot by a sniper in 1915 and died in his friends’ arms. Halfway through the war, the 4th Battalion had lost more than half its men. Half of those remaining fell in the horrendous battle of Loos. On Christmas Eve 1916, Lee was sketching the decimated village of Ypres.

Back home, his poetry was attracting attention. Ballads of Battle was published in 1916 and a second volume, Work-a-day Warriors, the following year. They were highly acclaimed. The Guardian called Ballads of Battle "one of the most striking publications of the war". The books were read in New York where a journalist asked: "Who is this new poet...who has just written one of the most interesting books of verse published since the war began?" Enthusiasts invited him to tour the US, though he was unable to take up the opportunity.

LEE, AGED 39 on his arrival at the trenches, brought a maturity to the experience which some of the younger war poets lacked. He had a journalist’s mind and an artist’s eye and his natural Scottish reserve means that although his feelings are present in his work, they are rarely foregrounded. Nevertheless, he evokes his longing for open spaces amid the filth of the trenches, his inability to grieve for his fallen comrades, his questioning of such a waste of life.

His poetry is particularly outstanding in its range and its immediacy. "Owen and Sassoon’s work is full of angst, they rail against the war," says Burrows. "Lee’s poems are capsules of what happened: the tanks and dug-outs, the Indian soldiers - he is the only poet to write about them. He writes in the trenches while battle is raging. In one poem he actually mentions the bullets hitting the wall while he’s writing. Yet surrounded by the stench and the filth and the gore of decaying bodies, he can write so vividly about the sea that you feel it on your face." Writing poetry helped Lee bear the trenches, claims Burrow, but he had another powerful reason for hope. He had first met Dorothy Barrie in 1910, when he judged a singing competition. She was 12. Now a student of the Royal Academy of Music, she was maturing into a beautiful young woman and a talented musician. Visits to London on leave were spent courting her.

However, these stopped at the end of 1917. After the disastrous battle of Cambrai, Lee was listed missing or dead. Dundee mourned its hero until a second telegraph arrived, via the Red Cross, telling them he had been taken as a prisoner-of-war. Though conditions were far from ideal, he fared well in prison. On his birthday, he persuaded one of the German officers to buy him a sketchbook and pencil and was soon in demand as a portraitist. He also wrote plays and organised their performance. "He became the camp focal point," says Burrows. "Everyone writing about the camp refers to him."

After the war Lee returned to London, to journalism and to Dorothy, whom he married in 1924: she was 24, he 48. Despite the age difference they seem to have had a very close relationship which lasted until Lee’s death in 1949. They settled in Epsom, but frequently spent time in London counting among their friends and acquaintances many of the stars of the day, including _Stanley Spencer, Ellen Terry, GK Chesterton, Hugh Walpole and Max Beerbohm. "He was friends with many influential people," says Burrows. "In fact, the amazing thing is that he is the only one of them who was never recognised for his achievements."

The second World War forced them from Epsom into London, where Lee often slept at the offices of his newspaper, the News Chronicle. "He would be working on the paper until 2am or 3am, would sleep in the cellars on a bunk bed then meet Dorothy for breakfast as the bombs were falling on London."

Burrows wonders whether Lee’s literary achievements might have been further recognised had he not had a high profile disagreement with the poet laureate of the day, Robert Bridges.

Bridges’ criticism of Robert Burns angered Lee and caused a flurry of irate letters to pass between them. Burrows questions whether Bridges and the influential circle of writers who lived around him in Oxford could have played a part in allowing Lee to slip out of the history books.

However, perhaps the biggest barrier to his attaining fame was his own personality. "He was a man of great integrity and honesty, but he was a very modest man. He was not ambitious or pushy. I hope that now, particularly in Scotland, people will give him the recognition he deserves. He never sought for it himself."

• Fighter Writer by Bob Burrows is published by Breedon Books at £16.99.©The Scotsman"