Rose E. Sharland, nee Teague (1882 – 1956) – British poet, writer and journalist

With thanks to Canadian genealogist Annette Fulford for finding Rose for us and  helping with my research into Rose's life and times. 

Annette’s main field of research is First World War Brides, soldiers' dependents 1914-1921 and Canadian Immigration 

Rose Emily Teague was born in Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire, UK on 11th September 1882.  Her parents were Charles Teague, a builder, and his wife Fanny, nee Lees.  Rose had a brother – Arthur Teague, b. 1871 – and a sister, Lilian Mary Teague, b. 1885.  

I have not been able to find out much about Rose, other than that she became a poet, writer and journalist.  In September 1906, she married Robert William Harold Sharland, a civil servant, and they went to live in Bristol.  Rose’s husband died on 15th February 1922.   The 1939 Census shows her still living in Bristol, a widow with the occupation of journalist.    

Rose died in Bristol in March 1956, leaving her assets to her sister, Lilian Mary Machin, nee Teague.

Rose had poems published in various newspapers and periodicals - The Daily Citizen, Daily Herald, Socialist Review, Clarion, Labour Leader, Justice, Bristol Observer and Malvern Gazette. Rose wrote an interesting article entitled “War and Romance” which was published in “The Folkestone, Hyde, Sandgate and Cheriton Herald”, on Saturday, 13th May 1916.

She also apparently wrote lyrics for songs or hymns, one of them being entitled the “May-Day Song Socialist Anthem”, which was set to music by J. Percival Jones (1908)

Rose E. Sharland had several collections of poetry published, the WW1 collection being “Maple Leaf Men : and other War Gleanings” by Rose E Sharland (J. W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1916).

“The Destroyer” 

ALL the sea lies spun in opal, pink and purple, blue and gold, 

Silver flashing in the sunshine, green within the crested fold. 

Little clouds chase one another on a sky of rarest blue, 

Amethystine in the water shado\v-ghosts are skimming through, 

Peaceful red sails dip and curtsey bowing to the freshening breeze, 

There the stalwart fishers gather harvesting the wealth of seas. 

Then across the water gliding, 

Like black Death the ocean riding, 

Low and seething through the waters with a boiling trail in tow, 

The Destroyer comes, defending 

With a vigil stern, unending, 

All the fair green-girdled country that her children cherish so. 

Black from stem to stern she hastens, and her white long tail of foam, 

Cleaves the sapphire of the waters circling round the shores of home, 

Black her guns, no flashing metals dancing in the summer sun, 

All is shrouded and in silence : desperate work is to be done. 

Dark forms on the decks assemble, men who form the living shield 

Twixt old England, home and beauty, and the foe on Flanders field. 

That is why those ships are gliding 

Like black Death the waters riding 

Through the dancing seas of England, never resting, never still ; 

Watching, waiting, tiring never, 

Splendid in their firm endeavour 

To protect the land they worship from all envy, hate and ill.

From: “Maple Leaf Men : and other War Gleanings” by Rose E Sharland (J. W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1916) pp. 41 – 42.

Other publications by Rose E. Sharland include:

Exmoor Lyrics and Other Verses, 1910

Voices of Dawn Over the Hills, 1912

Ballads of Old Bristol, 1914

Inside pages of "Ballads of Old Bristol"

The inside cover page of "Ballads of Old Bristol" has an illustration very reminiscent of an etching by Bristol artist Edward Sharland (1884 - 1967) but I have not been able to find out if there is a connection.

Illustration by Edward Sharland

Sources:  Find my Past, Free BMD, British Newspaper Archive,

https://archive.org/details/mapleleafmen00sharuoft/page/40/mode/2up

https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/doceww/person/3961

https://folkstream.com/405.html

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000765/19160513/136/0006

Lola Ridge (1873 – 1 941) – Irish born poet who lived in New Zealand, Australia and America

With thanks to Dr Connie Ruzich for reminding that that, although Lola is on my List of Female Poets of the First World War, I had not yet researched her.  I now understand why I placed Lola in my List as a New Zealand poet. But where to put her?  What do you think? 

Cover of Lola's collection

Rose Emily Ridge was born in 1873 in Dublin, Ireland (Eire). Her parents were Joseph Henry and Emma Ridge, nee Reilly - she was their only surviving child. Lola's father died when she was three years old and her mother toook her to live in New Zealand, settling in Hokitika.  Emma later married a miner who was from Scotland.   

In 1895, Lola married Peter Webster, who managed a gold mine in Hokitika. In 1903, she left her husband and moved to Sydney, Australia with her three-year-old son Keith. She studied at Trinity College and enrolled in art classes at the Sydney Art School.  Lola had poems printed in the “Canterbury Times” and the “Otego Witness”, which were New Zealand publications, and in the  “Sydney Bulletin”, an Australian magazine.

After the death of her mother, Lola went to live in America, using the pen name Lola Ridge – artist and poet.  In 1907 she was living in San Francisco.  One of her poems was published in 1908 in “Overland  Monthly”, a magazine published in California, founded in 1868 by Anton Roman, a Bavarian-born bookseller who moved to California during the Gold Rush.  

Later in 1908, Lola went to live in Greenwich Village, New York, leaving her son in a childrens’ home in San Francisco. Her long poem, “The Ghetto”, was first published in “The New Republic”, a magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts, founded in 1914 and still going strong.  Lola’s first poetry collection, “The Ghetto and Other Poems”, was published in 1918. On 22nd October 1919, Lola married David Laws.

In 1935, Lola was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award, given by the Poetry Society of America. She died in 1941. Her papers are held at Smith College.

Collections by Lola Ridge include “The Ghetto, and Other Poems” (1918), “Sun-up, and Other Poems” (1920), “Red Flag” (1927), “Firehead” (1930), and “Dance of Fire” (1935).

Some of Lola's poems:

"DREAMS"

  Men die...

  Dreams only change their houses.

  They cannot be lined up against a wall

  And quietly buried under ground,

  And no more heard of...

  However deep the pit and heaped the clay--

  Like seedlings of old time

  Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--

  Dreams will to light.

  "THE FIRE"

  The old men of the world have made a fire

  To warm their trembling hands.

  They poke the young men in.

  The young men burn like withes.

  If one run a little way,

  The old men are wrath.

  They catch him and bind him and throw him again to the flames.

  Green withes burn slow...

  And the smoke of the young men's torment

  Rises round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak,

  And the darkness thereof spreads over the sky....

  Green withes burn slow...

  And the old men of the world sit round the fire

  And rub their hands....

  But the smoke of the young men's torment

  Ascends up for ever and ever.

"THE TIDINGS" (Easter 1916)

  Censored lies that mimic truth...

       Censored truth as pale as fear...

  My heart is like a rousing bell--

       And but the dead to hear...

  My heart is like a mother bird,

       Circling ever higher,

  And the nest-tree rimmed about

       By a forest fire...

  My heart is like a lover foiled

       By a broken stair--

  They are fighting to-night in Sackville Street,

       And I am not there!

From “The Ghetto, and Other Poems” (1918) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4332

Sources:

https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2020/03/

https://mypoeticside.com/poets/lola-ridge-poems

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lola-ridge

https://poets.org/poet/lola-ridge

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4332

Lady Maud Warrender (1870-1945) – poet, singer, writer, patron of the arts & Head of the British Poetry Society

With thanks to Dr Margaret Stetz for telling me about Maud Warrender

Ethel Maud Ashley-Cooper was born on 16th December 1870. Her parents were Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 8th Earl of Shaftesbury Bt DL, (son of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury), and his wife, Harriet Augusta Anna Seymourina (Chichester), only daughter (and only surviving child) of the 3rd Marquess of Donegall. Ethel Maud’s siblings were: Margaret, b. 1858, Evelyn, b. 1865, Mildred, b. 1867, Violet, b.1868 and Anthony, b. 1869.  The family lived on an estate near Wimbourne, Dorset, UK.

On 6th February 1894 at St. Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, London, Maud married Vice-Admiral Sir George John Scott Warrender of Lochend, 7th Baronet, KCB, KCVO (31 July 1860 – 8 January 1917), who served as a senior officer in the British Royal Navy during the First World War.   One of his sisters, Alice Warrender, founded the Hawthornden Prize. 

Maud and George went on to have three children: Sir Victor Alexander George Anthony Warrender 8th Bt., 1st Baron Bruntisfield, Harold John Warrender and Violet Helen Marie Warrender. In 1903, the Warrenders bought Leasam House near Rye in East Sussex. Maud entertained many of the famous people of the day - the Elgars, the Kiplings, the Alfred Lyttletons, Nellie Melba and Ellen Terry.   George became Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth in March 1916. He requested retirement in December 1916, owing to a deterioration in his health. He died in January 1917. 

After her husband's death in January 1917, Maud worked for the Red Cross collecting books for the wounded. In her memoir "My First Sixty Years", she says:  "When I returned from Plymouth in 1917 I worked for the Red Cross Hospital Library, which was started by Mrs. Gaskell in order to supply the wounded  everywhere in our many campaigns during the War.   Millions of books were sent out from Surrey House, which was lent by Lady Battersea, where now stands the Regal Cinema at the Marble Arch.  The Red Cross Library was started by May Gaskell because she had remembered how, in the Boer War, any books that happened to be in the Hospital had to be divided into portions and handed on from bed to bed until they fell to pieces." 

In 1917 Maud became a District Commissioner of the Rye Division of Girl Guides and wrote a Marching Song for the Guides, "bringing in all our slogans": 

All the world is full of Music, 

Let us sing our way through life. 

There’s a song for those who hear it. 

Bringing peace and ending strife. 

There is Music in the Sunshine 

We can shed — We take out stand 

And we vow, as Guides, 

That whate’er betides. 

We’ll be there to knd a hand. 

Refrain and Chorus:

Be prepared shall be our watchword. 

Let us sing it every day. 

Pressing forward, looking upward, 

Helping others on their way ; 

Be prepared for joy or sorrow. 

Always smiling, come what may. 

And the world shall see what Guides can be 

As we march along on life’s highway. 

Let the message dear come ringing : 

Onward! Upward! Let us prove 

That the song the Guides are singing 

Gives us courage, brings us love. 

All the world is full of Music, 

Let us make our lives a song, 

That wll make hearts beat. 

And will lift our feet 

As we bravely march along. 

Chorus. Be prepared, etc. 

In her memoir, Maud tells us:  “Hermann Darewski composed a marching tune to these words, most generously giving me the copyright and five thousand copies, which were sold for the Guide Funds.  (From “My First Sixty Years” by Maud Warrender (Cassell & Co. Ltd., London, 1933) pp. 128 and 129. 

NOTES:

Herman Darewski (17 April 1883 – 2 June 1947) was a British composer and conductor of light music.

Maud was also a founding member of the charity which, in her day, was known as the Musicians Benevolent Fund and is now called Help Musicians UK

The Poetry Society was founded in 1909 to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”.

Dr Margaret Stetz is Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware in America.

SOURCES:

https://elgarsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Vol.-14-No.-3-November-2005-Compressed.pdf

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.209233/2015.209233.My-First_djvu.txt

https://vad.redcross.org.uk/Card?sname=Warrender&id=218471

Portrait of Lady Maud Warrender by American artist Violet Oakley (June 10, 1874 – February 25, 1961).

Lady Maud Warrender's WW1 Recrod card is from the British Red Cross WW1 website

Edith C.M. Dart (1873 – 1924) – British poet

Edith was born in Crediton, Devon in 1873. Her parents were William Dart, a building contractor, and his wife Charlotte Elizabeth, nee Mead. Edith’s siblings were Catherine E Dart, b. 1858, and Alice M. Dart, b. 1868.

It seems that Edith lived her life in Crediton, Devon and never married.  She died in 1924.

“Not Yet” by Edith Dart published in “The English Review” March 1920, page 201

Someday I'll know again, maybe, 

All that once made Spring rich for me 

Strange sense of beauty's leaping thrill 

At the first budding daffodil, 

Swift echo of the blackbird's song 

Within the heart;  the sudden throng 

Of bud and flower the whole wood through 

As when ... I walked it, once . . . with you. 

Surely I shall be glad again 

For April meadows after rain, 

For hawthorns white along the lea, 

Sky bluer than a summer sea. 

When years have gone, will earth not show 

Once more her treasures 'neath the snow, 

Waking my heart with crocus gold 

Against the darkness of the mould ? 

Shall I rejoice then o'er and o'er 

In the great bounty of Earth's store? 

Maybe . . someday . . . when I forget. 

Not yet, beloved, ah ! not yet ! 

Edith Dart had a poem published in the WW1 Anthology “For Consolation: poems” Compiled by William Chomel Tuting (Home Words, 1915)

Sources:  Catherine W Reilly, “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) p.p. 30 and 104.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HgUrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

“The English Review” March 1920, page 201

https://archive.org/stream/englishrevima20londuoft/englishrevima20londuoft_djvu.txt