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WILFRED OWEN

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Lands of Our Fathers

Here I turned and looked at the hills I had come across. There they stood, darkly blue, a rain cloud, like ink, hanging over their summits. Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown and of wonder, the land of Arthur and Merlin!

George Borrow, Wild Wales, 1862

His beauty, dress, and manner struck me as so out of place in such a street, that I could not possibly divine what had transplanted this delicate exotic from the conservatories of some Regent-street to the untidy potato-patches of Liverpool.

Herman Melville, Redburn, 1849

Fighting in 1918, Wilfred Owen scrambled out of a trench and confronted the machine guns with 'quick bounds from cover to cover', 'remembering my own duty, and remembering also my forefathers the agile Welshmen of the Mountains'. The Owens seem to have come, some way back, from the north-west of Wales, wild Wales, and Wilfred Owen's father Tom certainly liked to believe that he was descended from a certain Baron Lewis Owen, knight of the shire and baron of the exchequer under the Tudors, a member of parliament, an usher of the chamber and sheriff of mountainous Merionethshire: 'it was a family belief and the legend, it is known, has been passed down orally from father to eldest son for many generations'. Descended from Gwrgan ab Ithel, a prince of Powys, with a wife said to be descended from the mother of Richard II,5 this Welsh magnate lived in a substantial house ('the great barn of the Baron') at Dolgelly that was reputed to have once been a meeting house for Owen Glendower's parliament, and the Baron was something of a principled Welsh leader in the tradition of Glendower. Owen is a common name, especially in that corner of Wales, where, north of Dolgelly, the mountains include Moel HafodOwen, standing above the River Wen, and plenty of the mountains' grubby slate-quarrymen and illiterate sheep-farmers have possessed the name – which might mean 'well born' or 'noble' but could also derive from the Welsh for lamb, oen. There is still no real evidence for the connection between Wilfred and Lewis Owen, but Lewis Owen probably had seven sons and four daughters, and those children had many children too (his eldest son, for instance, had ten), and this continued down the generations, so if one throws in illegitimate children along the way then the Lewis Owen clan is large and genealogists have their work cut out. Such was the fertility of the Owen clan, and the fame of the Baron, that in 1886 the National Eisteddfod offered a prize of £20 for an essay on the descendants of Baron Owen.

If the Baron was famous in Wales, it was really his death that he was famous for. In October 1555, Lewis Owen was near Dinas Mawddwy, to the east of Dolgelly, when he was ambushed and murdered. It has always been said that his death was at the hands of the Red Bandits, a gang of red-haired rogues and profligates so feared in those parts that the locals put scythes in their chimneys to protect against the intruding ginger killers. Legend has it that, at the spot now known as Baron's Gate, these banditti lay in wait in an upland wood, where, although it was autumn, the trees still allowed a man to hide, and their red hair would have been camouflage among the scarlet and copper leaves. Knowing that the Baron would be travelling that way with his retinue, they put trees in the road in order to halt the travellers (a tactic later used by German troops in the First World War), and as the Baron's attendants tried to move the trees they received a shower of arrows from the hidden gang and fled, leaving the Baron with only his kinsman, John Lloyd, for company. When the bandits came out of hiding and took to their victims with swords and daggers, these two men put up a brave fight, but Lloyd and Owen were outnumbered and their butchered bodies were unceremoniously left in the road without palls, orisons, candles or passing-bells. But five poets wrote elegies when the Baron died, and a cross was erected at the spot where he fell; the woods became known as Ffridd-y-Groes, the enclosure of the cross. The law's response to the Baron's murder was so brutal and unstinting that 'the horde of desperadoes'10 were quickly executed or driven out of Wales, hence the comment by one seventeenth-century descendant, Robert Vaughan, that 'with the loss of his life he purchased peace and quietness to his country, the which God be praised we enjoy even to our days'.

In the summer of 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote a faux-medieval poem called the 'Ballad of Lady Yolande', and when writing it he might have had Baron Owen in mind: it is about Baron Oberon or Oberond and his rival for the heart of Lady Yolande is a red lad – not a red-haired bandit, but he is dressed in scarlet silk and 'His cheek was red as bin her owne / And full as red his lips'. The Baron journeys westward, deep into Wales: Owen mentions 'the western shore', 'the western march' and 'the wild welsh march' and another character has the Welsh name Sir Price and lives in a Welsh plas ('plas' is Welsh for hall or mansion, hence the Baron's house called Cwrt Plas yn Dre). The Baron defeats Sir Price in this Welsh landscape, but there the poem ends, unfinished, and one is left to wonder whether he would eventually have been defeated by the red youth – as, in a sense, he already has been, because it was this lad and not the Baron who had won Lady Yolande's heart.

Wilfred Owen looked Welsh – one person who knew him before the war stressed that Owen 'could only have come from the "Celtic fringes" in these islands', recalling him as 'a rather small, good-looking, young Welshman' (dark and little-legged like the classic Welshman, Owen would grow up to be just 5 feet 5 ½ inches). There have been unconvincing attempts to suggest that Owen had a Celtic temperament – emotional, wistful, sentimental, passionate. Later in his life, he would make a number of admiring references to the Welsh, and would refer to his Welsh ancestry. 'It is pleasant to be among the Welsh,' he wrote in June 1917. Then in May 1918, Owen looked forward to writing blank-verse plays on old Welsh themes, turning to stories that his Welsh ancestors would have known – possibly tales of famous Owens like Owen Laurgoch, 'Owen of the Red Hand', seven feet tall and a popular hero in Welsh ballads, who is sometimes given legends that are elsewhere linked with King Arthur; or Owain, the son of Arthur's sister Modron or of Morgan le Fay; or perhaps even Baron Lewis Owen. But Wilfred Owen was not quite a Welshman. As Dylan Thomas discovered, 'any claim we may make to Wilfred Owen as a Welshman has been repudiated, Anglo-Saxonly and indignantly, by his brother and, I think, his mother'. One of his forefathers left the mountains, and the Owens became English. Tom Owen was a Cheshire lad from Nantwich. Any longing for the west was a residual instinct seen in Tom Owen's love for 'Men of Harlech' (Harlech being in their ancestral corner of Wales), his favourite gramophone record, which Wilfred thought 'beastly', and in the Owens' occasional holidays in towns like Aberystwyth. It also seems that Tom Owen's voice could throw itself back to Wales on occasions – his son Harold remembered a startling reversion:

My father in his unbelievably rare and so quickly suppressed flashes of emotional tenderness always lapsed into a sort of hybrid Welsh in the choice of his words. His voice and inflections at these times were purely Welsh and very beautiful indeed.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born at Oswestry, a rather Welsh town in Shropshire, early in the morning of Saturday 18 March 1893. Only five miles from the Welsh–English border, Oswestry combined the two cultures, the two languages. Welsh was still spoken by some of the residents, and the literary associations of Oswestry are mostly Welsh, for example with the scholar Edward Lloyd (or Lhuyd) and the poets Goronwy Owen, Wiliam Llyˆn and Guto'r Glyn. Many people would say that Oswestry is really a bit of Wales that just happens to be in England. Wilfred Owen was almost a Welsh writer by birth. Many of the inhabitants had, and have, Welsh names – one of them was Edward Thomas, the Oswestry ironmonger whose granddaughter Barbara Pym, the quintessentially English novelist, was born in the town in 1913. Owen's birthplace had a Welsh plas as its name: Plas Wilmot. And given that it was March when Owen was born, there might even have been a few Welsh daffodils in the south-facing garden. Oswestry was the hometown of Owen's mother, Susan; and his mother's family was English, carrying the un-Welsh surname Shaw, although like the Owens they might have had some Welsh blood from some way back.

The name Wilfred was not a family name, and is usually associated with the north of England because of the cult of St Wilfrid (or Wilfred), a seventh-century bishop from Northumbria who is associated above all with York, Ripon and Hexham. But St Wilfrid also played an important part in the cult of another seventh-century Northumbrian saint, Oswald, a king and martyr who was buried at Oswestry ('Oswald's Tree'). Susan and Tom Owen had married on 8 December 1891 in St Oswald's Church, where, appropriately, Wilfred Owen was later christened. The Christian name appears to haunt his writing, so, for instance, when in 'Insensibility' he rhymes 'red' and 'rid' he seems to be playing with the fact that 'Wilfred' is pronounced 'Wilfrid', and is there not a hint of his name in 'killed' and 'friend' in the famous line 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend'? In the same way, his mother's maiden name is alluded to elsewhere with 'nuzzling boars ran grunting through the shaw'.

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Owen's mother, Susan Shaw, was born at Plas Wilmot on 17 March 1867: mother and son were born in the same room of the same house on 17 March and 18 March, respectively. The detached house was pretty, and essentially rural, located at the edge of the market town, and no doubt the births of these two spring babies were attended, at a respectful distance, by chiffchaffs, newly arrived that week, and even a swallow or two. But 16 March would not be a day for celebrations: Owen's grandfather Edward Shaw (born in 1821) lived until 15 January 1897, and then Plas Wilmot was sold that year, its contents being auctioned at the house on 16 March, the day before Susan's thirtieth birthday and two days before Owen's fourth. The loss of his grandfather and the house seems to chime with a feeling, in that year of the Diamond Jubilee, that the Victorian Age, with all its success and confidence, was passing away; a feeling enhanced by the deaths of magisterial Victorians, such as Arnold in 1888, Browning in 1889, Cardinal Newman in 1890, Tennyson and Cardinal Manning in 1892, and Millais and William Morris in 1896. Plas Wilmot was an expense that no one could afford, not even Edward Shaw, who had achieved some affluence as an ironmonger and some status as mayor. The house had been built by Wilfred Owen's maternal grandmother's family, the Salters, and was occupied by the Shaws: Edward Shaw married Mary Salter on 30 April 1857, another spring event, and she was already the owner of Plas Wilmot as the eldest of the children of the couple who built the house, Edward and Mary Salter. Edward and Mary Shaw then had a son called Edward, a daughter called Mary, a daughter called Emma and a daughter called (Harriett) Susan. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, Susan's first child, had within his name the name of the man who had created Plas Wilmot.

The house still stands, on Weston Lane which, although a little more suburban now, is still a beautiful rural lane and Plas Wilmot is a largish residence peering from behind tall trees, iron gates, garden greenery and an old garden wall, and taking in the view of the unspoilt Shropshire landscape. Susan loved the house. She drew a picture of Plas Wilmot in about 1885, and, looking up to the house from the bottom of the drive, the picture emphasises the grandeur of her home, as if it's a country house accessed down a long driveway through a vast estate. A black-coated, black-hatted figure, presumably her father, strides towards the door, while above, a number of carefree birds wheel elegantly. The drawing speaks of seclusion and security. It is also a remnant of her artistic ambitions. Susan had taken art classes for some time in her youth, her art teacher urging her to further her art education, and Susan believed for the rest of her life that she could have become a proper artist if she hadn't had to stay at home and care for her parents (her mother died in 1891). So that sketch of Plas Wilmot represents the life that she gave up art for, but she wanted her son to inherit both the house and her artistic sensibility. When she preserved a lock of her baby's hair with the words ' The hair of Sir Wilfred Edward Salter-Owen at the age of 11½ months – in the year 1894', the surname gave him the double-barrelled distinctiveness of the upper classes; however, it may also have been a reference to the painter Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, whom Owen later referred to as one of 'the mighty ones', who, when Owen was 10½ months old, became a baronet, and his double-barrelled surname was officially adopted, the artist having 'in the natural yearning of mortal man not to be lost in the million of Joneses, put another family name before it, [...] but solely from dread of annihilation'. Yet when her father died it became clear that while her son might become an artist and a baronet he would not inherit the home Edward Salter built. Looked at again, the sketch of Plas Wilmot could show a black-clad undertaker, or Death himself, approaching the house while ominous birds of prey circle overhead.

Wilfred Owen only lived in Oswestry for four years, but even so, he had fond memories of Plas Wilmot. Susan recorded that Owen remembered Plas Wilmot garden and his grandad. In September 1911, Owen visited Nellie, once a maid at Plas Wilmot, and 'Spent the time very pleasantly in recalling our reminiscences of the common fountain-head of our existences, known by all as the "old Home"'. She had an album of old photographs of the family. One Plas Wilmot photograph from 1895 depicts Owen with his bow-legged grandfather, the wee boy holding his grandfather's walking stick as if he had inherited a sword. Both figures look wary and ill at ease, and the photograph suggests fragility – the stick props up the boy and the old man bends slightly to hold his grandson's hand. Another photograph from that year is especially powerful, depicting a caged parrot, a faceless doll, Grandfather Shaw in a top hat with a reluctant cat on his knee, Susan's sister Emma Gunston and her three cherubic children, three members of staff, looking wistful, and, centre stage, Susan Owen holding a serious-looking Wilfred. There aren't many smiles but the family looks just a little like a small travelling circus. The ringmaster died two years later, the contents of the house were sold, and presumably the servants had to move elsewhere. What happened to the parrot called Jubilee? Who looked after the cat? Even now, the photograph carries some sadness because we know what happened next – the death of the old man, and then the coming of the Great War. Presumably the young male servant with the wistful look fought in the war, and although the Gunston boy didn't, the Owen boy did. We can see the famous 1916 photograph of Second Lieutenant Owen (uniformed, confident and sensitive) in the baby who doesn't show his full face to the camera, but, exposing his left cheek, meets the camera with his eyes – both photographs were taken, twenty-one years apart, by John Gunston, husband of Emma. Susan's other sister, Mary ('May') had married in 1884 a Dr Richard Loughrey, who worked on the Mile End Road in the East End (they were there in 1888 when the Jack the Ripper murders took place) but she died three years after Owen was born, leaving four children; within a year, Susan had to cope with the death of her oldest sister, the death of her father and the loss of her home.

According to Susan, Owen dearly loved his Grandfather Shaw, and Plas Wilmot must have been a jolly place for a little boy because it had a large garden and various animals. Edward Shaw was an expert bird-keeper, much involved with bird-fanciers' competitions, and he seems to have shared this hobby with his young grandson: at the Oswestry Flower Show in 1894, when this grandson was a year and a half old, a Wilfred Owen won second prize for 'Best pen of fantails' and first prize for 'Best pen of game bantams'. Was this the famous poet's first public success, with some assistance from his beloved grandad? In Susan Owen's recollections we can see that at Plas Wilmot the little boy had looked up to his grandfather above all:

Another winter day when his father fell into our little skating pool 'and crawled out like a horse' as he said he (W) did not seem frightened until he got near the house when he sobbed 'because Grandad would be so cross with my Daddie. I heard him tell Daddie to be careful not to fall in as the ice was thin in places'.

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Excerpted from WILFRED OWEN by GUY CUTHBERTSON. Copyright © 2014 Guy Cuthbertson. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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