E. W. Tennant 
Edward Wyndham Tennant planned a career in the Diplomatic Service, but at the outbreak of war immediately joined the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards. He excelled in officer training being posted to the Front aged just 18, facing action at the Battle of Loos 1915 with 2nd Lt.’s Osbert Sitwell and Harold Macmillan.
His father, Lord Glenconner, Liberal MP for Salisbury and Lord Lieutenant of Peeblesshire was the son of industrialist, Sir Charles Clow Tennant. Edward enjoyed many summers on the Glen Estate but immortalised his childhood home, Wilsford Manor, in ‘Home Thoughts in Laventie’.
Bim and his mother exchanged letters almost daily during his time at the Front, sending home poems for his collection ‘Worple Flit’. After his death she compiled these as ‘a memoir’ to her son dedicating it ‘to all mothers who have suffered the same loss’.
“When things were at their worst” wrote a private to Lady Glenconner “he would pass up and down the trench cheering the men, when danger was greatest his smile was loveliest. All was ready to go anywhere with him, although he was so young."
Edward’s cousin Percy fell at the Battle of Aisne 1914, cousin Yvo at Loos 1915 and his brother Hugo in Sinai in Spring 1916. Cousin Raymond, Lt. Asquith son of the Prime Minister, was killed in action at the Somme just 7 days before Edward was shot by a sniper on 22 September 1916. They were buried together at the Guillemont Road Cemetery.
HOME THOUGHTS IN LAVENTIE by Edward Wyndham Tennant (Extract)
...Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick
Two roofless ruins stand,
And here behind the wreckage where the back wall should have been
We found a garden green…
...
So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass,
In noisey continuity until their very rattle
Seems in itself a battle.
At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden’s little length
A fresh pleasaunce to find;
And there some yellow daffodils and jasmine hanging high
Did rest the tired eye…
...
Hungry for spring,
I bent my head,
The perfume fanned my face,
And all my soul was dancing
In that lovely little place,
Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered towns
Away upon the Downs.
I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A-courting on the leas;
And meadows with their glittering streams, and silver scurrying dace,
Home - what a perfect place!
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Notes
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