Edward Thomas

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Philip Thomas (3 March 1878 – 19 April 1917) was a British poet, essayist, and novelist.

He is often regarded as a war poet, but few of his poems refer specifically to his war experiences, and his poetry career began only after he had already been a popular writer and literary critic.

He enlisted in the British Army in 1915 to fight in the First World War and was killed in combat during the Battle of Arras in 1917, just after he arrived in France. The Petersfield Museum in Hampshire houses a Thomas Study Centre.

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Life and career

Edward Thomas was the son of Mary Elizabeth Townsend and Philip Henry Thomas, a civil servant, author, preacher, and local politician. He was born in Lambeth, an area of current south London, first in Surrey and then in Surrey. He was educated at Belleville School, Battersea Grammar School, and St Paul's School, all located in London.

Thomas' family was mainly Welsh. Five of his six great-grandparents for whom information has been retrieved were found in Wales, five in Ilfracombe, and one in Wales. Both four of his grandparents were born and brought up in Wales. His paternal grandparents lived in Tredegar, one of which was a child. Rachel Phillips' grandmother had been born and brought up in Neath, but Henry Thomas, his grandfather, died as a collier and then an engine fitter, was born in Neath. Philip Henry, Edward Thomas' uncle, was born in Tredegar and spent his childhood there.

Edward Thomas Townsend, the son of Margaret and Alderman William Townsend, a Newport merchant active in Liberal and Chartist politics, was Thomas Townsend, Thomas' maternal grandfather. Catherine Marendaz, a grandmother from Margam, just outside of Port Talbot, where her family had been tenant farmers since the late 1790s. Mary Elizabeth Townsend's daughter married Philip Henry Thomas Thomas. Of course, Edward Thomas' parents were Mary and Philip.

Though Edward Thomas' father, Philip Henry Thomas, had left Tredegar for Swindon (and then London), "the Welsh connection was... enduring." He continued to visit his relatives in south Wales throughout his life. His feelings for Wales were also evident in other ways. There were frequent trips to Merthyr to speak on behalf of the Ethical Society, as well as a trip to a National Eistedfod in north Wales in 1906. Philip Thomas "assiduously nurtured his Welsh ties," to the point that Edward Thomas and his brothers could even say that they knew Lloyd George.

Edward Thomas, like his father before him, continued to visit his many relatives and friends in Ammanford, Newport, Swansea, and Pontardulais. Thomas shared a twenty-year friendship with John Jenkins (Gwili), the Hendy's teacher, theologian, and poet, just over the county line from Pontardulais. Thomas Gwili's elegy details the many walks they took together in the countryside around Pontardulais and Ammanford. Such was the family's link to this area of Wales in which three of Edward Thomas' brothers were sent to school at Watcyn Wyn's Academy in Ammanford, where Gwili had been headmaster in 1908.

Thomas was a history scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1898 to 1900. Helen Berenice Noble (1877–1967) in Fulham married him in June 1899, while still an undergraduate and determined to live his life by the pen. He then worked as a book reviewer, reading up to 15 books a week. By the time of war, he was already an experienced writer, having worked as a literary critic and biographer as well as writing about the countryside. He wrote The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), a "book of delightful disorder" in a series.

Thomas was a literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London and became a close friend of Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies, whose career he almost single-handedly developed. Thomas lived at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks, Kent, from 1905 to 1906. He rented a tiny cottage near Davies and nurtured his writing as best he could. Thomas arranged for the manufacture of a makeshift wooden leg for Davies by a local wheelwright.

The family moved to Steep, East Hampshire, on the outskirts of Petersfield's historic market town, attracted by the landscape, its links with London, and teaching at the innovative co-educational private school Bedales. They lived in and around Steep for ten years before enlistment in 1916, when they relocated to Essex following Thomas' demobilization. Myfanwy, their third child, was born in August 1910.

Despite Thomas' conviction that poetry was the best form of literature and frequently discussed it, he only became a poet himself after living in Steep at the end of 1914, and he first published his poems under the name Edward Eastaway. Robert Frost, an American poet who was living in England at the time, had inspired Thomas (then more popular as a critic) to write poetry, and their friendship was so close that they decided to live side by side in the United States. "The Road Not Taken," Frost's most popular poem, was inspired by Thomas and Thomas' indecisiveness about which route to take on.

The village of Dymock, Gloucestershire, had become the home of a number of literary figures by August 1914, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson, and Robert Frost. At this point, Edward Thomas was a visitor.

Thomas revived Adlestrop's (now-abandoned) railway station in a poem of that name after his train made a stop at the Cotswolds station on June 24, 1914, just before the First World War began.

Thomas was enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who might have avoided enlistment. Frost, his friend who had returned to the United States but gave Thomas a preview copy of "The Road Not Taken," causing him to be unintentionally influenced in this decision. Frost intended the poem as a subtle mockery of indecision, particularly Thomas' indecision on their many walks together; however, most took it more seriously than Frost intended, and Thomas Thomas followed it more closely and personally, and Thomas provided Thomas with the last straw in Thomas's decision to enlist.

Thomas was promoted to corporal and in November 1916 he was recruited as a second lieutenant into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. He was killed in combat at Arras, France, shortly after arriving in France on Monday, 9 April 1917. Helen, Helen's widow, was taken aback by the possibility of a "bloodless death" i.e. Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body. However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington, who died many years later in an American archive, states that Thomas's death was caused by "shot clean through the chest." W. H. Davies' life was devastated by his death, and his commemorative poem "Killed in Action (Edward Thomas) was included in Davies' 1918 collection "Raptures."

Thomas is buried in Agny's Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery (Row C, Grave 43).

Thomas and his wife Helen had three children: Merfyn's son, Bronwen, and his daughters Bronwen and Myfanwy. Helen wrote about her courtship and early married life with Edward in the autobiography As It Was (1926); a second volume, World Without End, was released in 1931. Myfanwy later said that the books had been written by her mother as a form of therapy to help her lift herself from the deep depression she had suffered as a result of Thomas' death.

Helen's memoir A Memory of W. H. Davies was published in 1973, shortly after her own death. Helen's writings were assembled into a book published under the title Under Storm's Wing in 1988, which included As It Was and World Without End, a collection of other short stories by Helen and her daughter Myfanwy, and six letters sent by Robert Frost to her husband.

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