http://www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/whatsOn/lunchtimeLectures/

Ross appeared at this May’s Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival, along with  Brendan McCarthy, Pat Mills, Gillian Slovo, Arthur Smith and Mark Steel.

http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/Services/LeisureCulture/Libraries/ReadersWritersFestival.htm

This project could mean a wheel has turned full circle. Steve’s talks arose from the interest stirred up by Ross Davies’s biography, Drummond Allison: Come, Let Us Pity Death.

Ross was inspired to write his Allison biography by Steve’s achievement in bringing out the 1994 Collected Poems.

In the 1990s, Steve, was headmaster of Bishop’s Stortford College. A keen cricketer, Steve one day read an admiring reference in a cricketing anthology to Allison’s poem ‘Verity’.

This is Allison’s lament for Hedley Verity, the great Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner. Verity died of wounds during the 1943 invasion of Sicily.

Steve recalled that Bishop’s Stortford College has long had a Drummond Allison Prize for Poetry, and decided to find out who Allison was.

Fascinated by what he discovered about the character, poetic achievement and gallantry of this former pupil of the college (1935-1939) and his tragically-short life, Steve decided to collect Allison’s verse and to make it better known.

In the Allison family’s manuscripts, Steve found another, unpublished, cricketing poem, ‘The Oval’, written when the war led to the legendary pitch being abandoned to the weeds, the pitch designated but never used as a prisoner-of-war camp.

Bishop’s Stortford College published Steve’s The Collected Poems of Drummond Allison, adding new poems and biographical material to Michael S. Sharp’s 1978 Whiteknights Press Poems of Drummond Allison.

Steve’s 1994 collection was enthusiastically reviewed, sold out long ago and is now a collector’s item.

Drummond Allison: Come, Let Us Pity Death
By Ross Davies

£9.95
London. Cecil Woolf (2008)
ISBN 978-1-897967-91-1

Cecil Woolf Publishers
1 Mornington Place
London NW1 7RP
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7387  2394