Drummond Allison (SHb, 35-39) : Stortford’s Lost War Poet

Come let us pity Death

Come let us pity not the dead but Death,

For He can only come when we are leaving,

He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.

He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug

But never knew his heart before it failed him.

He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry

But could not watch her body undivided.

Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman

He had no time to hear my brother laughing.

He sees us when, a boring day bent double,

We take the breaking point for new beginning

Prepared for dreamless sleep or dreams or waking

For breakfast but now sleep past denying.

He has no life, no exercise but cutting;

While we can hope for a houri, a phantom,

Look forward to No Thoughts. For Him no dying

Nor any jolt to colour His drab action,

Only the plop of heads into the basket,

Only the bags of breath, the dried-up bleeding.

We, who can build and change our clothes and moulder,

Come let us pity Death but not the dead.

Drummond Allison

Among the poets of Second World War – Keith Douglas, Hamish Henderson, Alun Lewis – lies an Old Stortfordian: Drummond Allison. Killed on the front lines of Italy in 1943 at the young age of 22, Allison left behind countless poems exploring love, religion, even socialism as well as a few about the College itself. Without a doubt, his work solidifies himself as one of the great World War II poets, and yet at one point, he sat where I and many other students have sat, in a Hall now dedicated to him and the others who fought in the wars.

Allison’s time at Stortford began in 1935, under Headmaster Leo Price. The youngest of four brothers, he was the only one to attend the College, with the others going to Caterham. He flourished under the quite liberal attitudes of the College, as a boy of socialist ideals – said by his friends (in particular Eric Jones, another former pupil) to be idealistic and left wing. Amidst his many achievements at the school, he was head of the newspaper – one which still stands today – had an affinity for cricket and, in his final year at Stortford, became the head of School House. As head of house, Allison was noted for his kindness, helping the younger ones with missing coats and standing up against bullying.

End of Term

In a week

There will be singing and

Shouting and the smell

Of empty passages and the noise of

Hurrying footsteps on the stairs.

Then I shall go in humming trains

Homeward. A day will come

While will be fresh in the morning,

Without bells and snarls and hurry.

Drummond Allison

Following his time at the College, Allison went on to study at Oxford University, where he met close friends and fellow poets John Heath Stubbs and Sidney Keyes. The war, however, would prove devastating to him. Allison’s brother, Douglas, died two weeks before Christmas in 1939 and served as the inspiration for his most famous poem, ‘Come let us pity Death’. Allison was a devout Christian and resented the violence of the war, yet in 1943, he was conscripted to fight. In April of the same year, while he was training, Keyes died in action and Allison he gave his final words to Heath Stubbs: a message to take care of his mother for him while he was away. Shortly after, in November of 1943, within only three weeks of properly joining the war, Allison was mortally wounded during an assault in Italy. A fellow Lieutenant, Colonel Whitfield, described how “his only thought was to help his men on.”

Allison was selfless and brave, not only in the war, but in his time at school and in college. His passion for poetry and thirst for knowledge is admirable and serves as inspiration to the many similarly minded students at the College.

In a letter to his mother from 1941, he explained his love for poetry, saying, “I’m more interested in the technique of verse, the skill with which it is constructed and the noise it makes, than its content and meaning. I should like to suggest to you that, even if a poem is obscure or desperate or about unpleasant things, it may be beautiful through its language and the picture it evokes.”

As Allison himself would say, let us not pity the dead, but we can celebrate their life. So, while we may have lost him in the war, his name, his poems and his legacy will be etched in our walls forever.

Catherine Milnes
L6th Tee House

November 2020