Remembering Wilfred

Remembrance Day is particularly poignant in Birkenhead where one of the town’s famous sons is a much-loved war poet. PAUL MACKENZIE reports

- Paul Mackenzie

SUSAN Owen didn’t like Birkenhead much. She moved there when her husband Thomas got a job at Woodside Station in the 1890s and wasn’t impressed at the changes in her life the move brought about. In her previous home she’d had a large, well-appointed rural home and staff. There was none of that in Birkenhead.

She might appreciate the place a little more if she were to re-visit today though, particularly the museum dedicated to her son Wilfred, arguably thought of now as Britain’s most famous and best-loved war poet.

As a boy, Wilfred was a pupil at Birkenhead Institute and it was during his time there that he began writing poetry. But it’s his later work that has endured and that he is now remembered for – poems such as Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth and Strange Meeting, which hide nothing of the awful things he experienced during World War One.

Owen was born in Oswestry and after his time in Birkenhead he took posts as a lay preacher near Reading and as a private English teacher for a family in France.

In October 1915 he enlisted in the 3/28th London Regiment which soon became the 2nd Artists Rifles Officers Training Corps and over the next year he was trained as a soldier at camps around England, including a couple of spells across the Mersey in Southport.

Weeks after leaving the North West he was in the front line in France just yards from a Howitzer gun as it mounted a 48 hour bombardment of the enemy who responded with a barrage of their own. Days later he took half of his platoon to occupy a former German bunker in No Man’s Land and a sentry under his command was blinded during the bombardment.