Herbert Eyres Britton and Diane

Herbert Eyres Britton's Diane [1920] was his third collection of poems after The Visions of a Dreamer (1912) and War Poems – date and publisher unknown (1). He dedicated it to his mother Maud May Britton, and a six-sonnet sequence in the collection concerns his recently deceased wife Elsie.

Also of note is 'In Memoriam', a poem written on the death of the working-class poet Noah Cooke, a weaver from Kidderminster who appears to have been a friend of Herbert's. The following link is to Sonya O. Rose's criticism of Cooke (2).

(1) Herbert E. Britton, Diane: And Other Poems (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, [1922]).

(2) Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (London: Routledge, 1992).

Herbert Eyres Britton: Poet

With all the manic energy of a permanently starved squirrel on speed, Robert Hughes continues to excavate his past (1). This time he's discovered that the poet Herbert Eyres Britton, who was Lionel Britton's uncle and a great-great-uncle of Robert himself, married Elsie Miriam Hickman (31) of Bishopstone (a village in Wiltshire just to the east of Swindon) in the parish church in 1909. Herbert was then 25 and a bank clerk living in Kidderminster. This led me back to Herbert's first book of poetry, The Visions of a Dreamer (1912), which includes a poem about Bishopstone. The book was published and printed in Kiddermister, and he also wrote a number of poems for the Kidderminster Shuttle; there are other poems about the River Stour, Kinver Edge and the Black Country, and there's a river trip from Holt Fleet to Stourport, which mentions Lincombe and Shrawley.

(1) Actually, I think he's on Budweiser. (Yes, he's informed me that this is the case. Who needs boring real ale?)