During this year’s battlefield’s tour with Jeremy Banning we went back to the area around the Wancourt tower above the river Cojeul. I had a vivid memory from a previous occasion of Jeremy reading Second Lieutenant Sidney Greenfield’s account of part of the battle of Arras and the capture of the tower. This October as…
I’m launching my second poetry collection, Voices from Stone and Bronze today, and I will be reading in Milton Keynes, London and North Wales. You can order your copy from Cinnamon Press. With thanks to Jan Fortune, Vanessa Gebbie, and Jeremy Banning and also all the members of the Thursday advanced poetry group who…
As I have been writing this blog post I came across my hand-written notes from October 2013 when Jeremy Banning first took me and other writers to Pigeon Ravine and I found Louis Doffman amongst the graves. I can’t remember now whether it was Jeremy who pointed out his headstone (as is his habit of…
On the walls of the First World War Memorial on Thiepval ridge are the names of 72,194 men, most of whom were killed during the Battle of the Somme (1st July -18th November 1916). They have no known grave, either because their remains were never found (they were obliterated by shell-fire) or because by the…
Two of the poems from my forthcoming collection, Voices from Stone and Bronze, have been published on London Grip for the winter. The first poem, What Louis Doffman knows, is in memory of a young man, Louis, who fought under an assumed name. I was introduced to his story by Jeremy Banning who took me…
As the year draws to a close I wanted to mention some of the lovely things that have come my way in this mostly unlovely year for me personally. One of my favourites of the autumn was Leaving the line – Images and words of War and Wondering. This is a Bristol based project created…
Once I was back home I applied myself to finding out more about Percy Honeybill and what might have happened to him. As always Jeremy Banning was an invaluable source of information. He confirmed that Percy would definitely have been in the first battalion of the Kings Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) and would have been…
My mother always used to say that if you came across a Honeybill anywhere in the world the chances were that we were related – Honeybill was her maiden name. It turns out she was more correct than she realised as the surname was ‘created’ by a clerk’s error in the mid eighteenth century which…
I woke early on the second day to the sound of a cockerel crowing somewhere nearby in the village. This was to be a day of the woods – Mametz, Mansel copse, Delville (known as Devil’s wood to the soldiers), and High Wood. I have an affection for woodland which goes back to a childhood…
Sometimes when another writer dangles an opportunity in front of your nose you have to say yes even if it doesn’t necessarily square with your other plans nor with the time you have available. So on the first Friday of October, thanks to Vanessa Gebbie, I found myself on Eurostar early in the morning heading…