Lady Jennifer MacLellan
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Lady Jennifer MacLellan has agreed to be the Honorary President of our Association Female Poets, Inspirational Women and Fascinating Facts of the First World War.
Lady MacLellan is the daughter of Forgotten Poet of the First World War Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Casson (1889 - 1944) who fought in both World Wars. She edited and published some of her father's poems in a booklet that was on sale at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. Dean Johnson of the Wilfred Owen Story museum in Birkenhead (Wirral Peninsula, UK) visited Craiglockart (now a campus of Edinburgh University) with "Bullets and Daffodils", his musical drama about Wilfred Owen who met Siegfried Sassoon while they were both receiving treatment at the hospital. Knowing that I would be interested, Dean brought me a copy of Stanley Casson's poems and I contacted Lady MacLellan to ask permission to write up an exhibition panel about Lt. Col. Casson.
Lady MacLellan very kindly replied, giving me a great deal of information about her father, so we asked her if she would like to be the Association's Honorary President and are delighted to announce that she has accepted.
The Link with Rupert Brooke
After the First World War, Stanley Casson was working in Athens when he was approached by a friend at the British Legation regarding the placing of a tomb over the grave of Rupert Brooke. Rupert Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a Sub-Lieutenant, joining the Hood Battalion, 2nd Brigade, R.N. Division. He took part in the Royal Naval Division's expedition to Antwerp in Belgium in 1914. Rupert's Division was en route for Gallipoli in a liner operated by the Union-Castle Line called the "Grantully Castle" that had been converted into a troopship. The flotilla of 200 odd ships that set sail from Avonmouth near Bristol in 1915 included the Dreadnought Battleship "The Prince George". The "Grantully Castle" put into Treis Bouke Bay on the Greek Island of Skyros, as the anchorage at Lemnos was already full of ships. Skyros is to the east of the mainland of Greece and is one of the Sporades Archipelago in the Aegean Sea (sporades being Greek for "those scattered").
According to the log of the French hospital ship in which Rupert was treated, during manoeuvres on the Island of Skyros he was bitten by a mosquito and his health deteriorated considerably. Lady MacLellan tells me that Rupert was already ill by the time he reached the Island, having been suffering from a fever and dysentery since the ships put in to Cairo in Egypt. He was transferred by cutter to the French Naval Hospital Ship "Duguay-Trouin", a converted French Naval destroyer, for treatment but he died on 23rd April 1915. See post on www.forgottenpoetsofww1.blogspot.co.uk of 1st March 2015.
Under orders to depart for Gallipoli, Brooke's friends in the Division had buried him hastily in a secluded dell - an Olive grove three hundred feet above sea level, surrounded by olive trees and bordered with the lovely flowers that bloom in Greece in springtime - in which the troops had stopped to rest during their manoeuvre exercises. The ceremony was very moving with his friends from the Division present, among them Patrick Shaw-Stewart who was a member of the firing party.
Determined that he should have a proper grave after the war, Rupert's mother commissioned marble to be specially sculptured in Athens and taken to Skyros. And so it was that Casson was the man who, with his knowledge of Greek sculpture, organised and supervised the construction and transport of the two and a half tons of marble and iron railings that you will see if you visit Brooke's grave today.
The logistics of the operation are quite remarkable and are detailed in a book called "Steady Drummer" written by Stanley Casson and published in 1935 by G. Bell of London. Lady MacLellan has kindly sent me a copy of the section concerning the grave of Rupert Brooke. Casson had to hire a boat to transport the marble, then get to the island himself. Once there, he had to build a small quay for the unloading of the seven or so crates containing the marble. Once on land, there was the problem of getting the crates up the hill to the site of the grave via the only road which was a rough goat track.
Nothing daunted, Casson cut wooden rollers from pine trees and began to level the track by removing outcrops of rock on the path. That alone took over a week. Then the crates had to be pushed up the track and Casson mentioned how much he admired and respected the architects of Stonehenge. During the evenings, Casson spent time with his hosts the local shepherds and goatherds on the island who offered him hospitality and shelter in their shack. After a supper of bread and milk, they would sit round an open fire, taking about the war with the shepherds, some of whom had served in a Greek Division sent to Odessa with other Allied troops.
Returning briefly to Athens to fetch some tools to complete the task, Casson enlisted the help of Norman Douglas. The pair returned to Skyros and oversaw the completion of the laying of marble tomb over Brooke's grave. Finally, Casson had the tomb consecrated by the head of the local monastery of St. George.
Casson reflected sadly: "I wondered what Brooke would have thought to see this strange assembly. I came away sadly to think that here was still another of my generation accounted for. It was a lonely world now for men of my age."
With grateful thanks to Lady Jennifer MacLellan for agreeing to become the Honorary President of our Association, for sending me so much information and for her help and encouragement.
Photograph of Lady MacLellan taken by her Grandson.
Photograph of Rupert Brooke's grave from Google Images.
Map of Greece showing the Islands of Skyros and also Lemnos where some of the wounded from Gallipoli were taken for treatment.
