Friday 26 December 2014

Coincidences

This project seems to take on a life of its own.  I had not realised that Alec Waugh was a poet. I knew he was a novelist and the brother of Evelyn who was one of my favourite authors during my teenage years (I was once successful during a job interview because I answered the question "What are you reading?" with "Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited").

Reading through Catherine W. Reilly's amazing Bibliography of English Poetry of the First World War - if you haven't read this please try to (see the details under "Bibliography" www.femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk) - I was surprised to find she had included Alec Waugh.  I did a little research for the Forgotten Poets section of the exhibition project and found that the Waugh family were related to the Gosse family.   You will find Philip Gosse, grandson of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, under my Fascinating Facts of the Great War heading - http://fascinatingfactsofww1.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/philip-gosse-official-rat-catcher-of.html.

Philip was for a time the official 2nd British Army Rat Catcher on the Western Front and his story is, to my mind, definitely "fascinating".

In his memoirs, Philip Gosse mentioned that his Mother had received a letter from their family friend Siegfried Sassoon - who is definitely NOT  "forgotten" !  In the letter. Sassoon described how Robert Graves had recently joined Sassoon's Regiment.  Philip's mother was an artist and writer.  It turns out that Philip's father Edmund William Gosse (1849 - 1928)  was also a poet.  And it is not surprising that Philip Gosse became a doctor  and a naturalist in his spare time, as one of his Grandfathers was a Homeopath and the other was the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.