Edgar Bowers

Edgar Bowers born 2 March 1924 (d. 2000)

Edgar Bowers was an American poet who won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1989.

Bowers was born in Rome, Georgia in 1924. He served in Counter-intelligence in Germany during World War II ending his military service in Berchtesgaden, Hitler's eyrie in the Bavarian Alps. The experiences of these years had a deep and permanent effect on his poetry.

On his discharge in April 1946 he returned to the University of North Carolina, and then finished his graduate studies with a Ph.D. in English at Stanford University.

For a decade he taught at several universities including Duke University and Harpur College. He then settled at the University of California at Santa Barbara where he stayed for 30 years until he retired in 1991. He was a member of the English Faculty where he specialised in English Renaissance and modern poetry.

Bowers published several books of poetry, including The Form of Loss, For Louis Pasteur, and The Astronomers. He won two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and taught at Duke University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959, and a second one in 1969.

The work of Edgar Bowers first came to be widely known in Britain in 1963 when Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn included him in their Faber volume Five American Poets.

Edgar Bowers was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1989 for his For Louis Pasteur.

After retiring in 1991 he moved to San Francisco. He died at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Oliver Baldwin

Oliver Baldwin born 1 March 1899 (d. 1958)

Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, known as Viscount Corvedale from 1937 to 1947, was a British politician who had a quixotic career at political odds to his father, three-time Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Baldwin was educated at Eton College, and grew up in the shadow of his father's political career. He joined the Irish Guards in 1916 and served in France through the remainder of World War I. After the war he travelled extensively and worked as a journalist and travel writer. He was in Armenia with the job of an infantry instructor; there the Bolsheviks imprisoned him for two months and later he was imprisoned by the Turks for a further grim five months. Despite his Conservative family, he gradually grew to adopt left-wing views and eventually announced that he was a Marxist and joined the Labour Party. He frequently addressed crowds from a socialist platform at Hyde Park Corner.

At the 1924 elections Baldwin contested the seat of Dudley for Labour. By this time his father was leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, and his candidacy naturally attracted press comment. At the 1929 election he won Dudley, and served as a backbench member of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government, facing his defeated father across the House.

He remained on personal good terms with his father despite their different politics, as each regarded their differences as being of principle and not personality. Baldwin refrained from personally attacking his father, and when he visited him, there was a tacit agreement that politics was not a suitable subject for discussion. Lucy Baldwin, who was also a strong Conservative, came from a background where questioning received opinion was regarded as a good thing, supported her son - although she did not like to attend the House of Commons to see her son and husband on opposite sides.

Like other young left-wing Labour MPs, Baldwin was critical of MacDonald's insistence on strict financial management and refusal to launch large Keynesian public works programmes. Early in 1931 Baldwin resigned from the Labour Party and briefly associated with Oswald Mosley's New Party, but repudiated Mosley after one day and rejoined Labour. When MacDonald formed the National Government Baldwin remained with the opposition Labour Party and inevitably lost his seat in the 1931 general election. He returned to journalism.

Baldwin fought Paisley at the 1935 election. In 1937 Stanley Baldwin retired from politics and was created Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. As a result Oliver Baldwin acquired the courtesy title Viscount Corvedale, although he remained a commoner. In 1939 he rejoined the army, becoming a major in the Intelligence Corps and serving in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Eritrea and Algeria.

Baldwin was homosexual, a fact well known within the family but not to the public (his mother was again supportive and both parents acknowledged his long term relationship with John Boyle).

At the 1945 general election, when Labour returned to power under Clement Attlee, Baldwin was elected for Paisley. In 1946 he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary for War, a post he held until 1947. But there was little chance that he would hold high office. His homosexuality was well-known, and Attlee held puritanical views on this issue: he kept Tom Driberg out of the government for the same reason.

When Stanley Baldwin died in 1947, Oliver succeeded him as Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. It was not possible at this time to renounce a peerage, and Baldwin had no choice but to leave the Commons and take his seat in the House of Lords. Later that year, presumably to give him a dignified exit from politics, he was appointed Governor of the Leeward Islands, a British colonial territory in the Caribbean. He created a minor scandal by taking John Boyle with him.

Partly for this reason, and partly because he made no secret of his continuing socialist views among the British planter elite in Antigua, Baldwin was recalled in 1950. He died in 1958 and was succeeded in the earldom by his brother.

A biography of Oliver Baldwin was published in 2003 Oliver Baldwin: A Life of Dissent by Christopher J Walker

Prince George, Duke of Kent

Prince George, Duke of Kent born 20 December 1902 (d. 1942)

The Prince George, Duke of Kent (George Edward Alexander Edmund) was a member of the British Royal Family, the fourth son of King George V. He held the title of Duke of Kent from 1934 to his death in 1942.

Prince George is remembered for having had a rather more interesting personal life than is the norm in the twentieth century Royal Family, as well as the circumstances of his death at the height of World War II.

Prince George received his early education from a tutor and then prep school. At age thirteen, like his brothers Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) and Prince Albert (later George VI) before him, he went to naval college, first at Osborne and later at Dartmouth. He remained in the Royal Navy, which he hated, until 1929, serving on the Iron Duke and later the Nelson. After leaving the navy, he briefly held posts at the Foreign Office and later the Home Office, becoming the first member of the British Royal Family to work as a civil servant.

Handsome and glamorous, the Duke of Kent was unarguably the most interesting, intelligent and cultivated member of his generation of the Royal Family. He took a strong interest in the arts, theatre, and in interior decoration, an interest he shared with Queen Mary but no other member of the family. He had a long string of affairs with men and women before and during his marriage. The better known of his partners were cabaret singer Florence Mills, banking heiress Poppy Baring, Ethel Margaret Whigham (later Duchess of Argyll), musical star Jessie Matthews and actor Noel Coward, with whom he carried on a 19-year affair. Love letters from the Duke to Coward are believed to have been stolen from Coward's house in 1942

The Duke of Kent is also said to have been addicted to drugs (notably morphine and cocaine) — a weakness which his brother the Prince of Wales (not an otherwise notably respectable member of the family) was reputed to cure him of during the latter part of the 1920s — and reportedly was blackmailed by a male prostitute to whom he wrote intimate letters. Another of his reported homosexual affairs was with his distant cousin Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia; homosexual spy and art historian Anthony Blunt was reputedly another lover. The Duke was known to have attempted to court Queen Juliana of the Netherlands (mother of the current Queen Beatrix).

In addition to his legitimate children, the Duke is said to have had a son by Kiki Preston (née Alice Gwynne), an American socialite known as 'the girl with the silver syringe', whom he reportedly shared in a ménage à trois with Jorge Ferrara, the bisexual son of the Argentine ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

On 29 November 1934, the Duke of Kent married Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. It was the last marriage between a son of a British Sovereign and a member of a foreign royal house to date. The marriage was not however arranged - he met the intelligent, cultivated and elegant Marina through his circle of friends and she proved to be an ideal and suitable match.

At the start of World War II, he returned to nominally active military service at the rank of Rear Admiral, briefly serving on the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty. In April, 1940, he transferred to the Royal Air Force. He temporarily relinquished his rank as Air Vice-Marshal (the equivalent of Rear Admiral) to assume the post of Staff Officer in the RAF Training Command at the rank of Air Commodore.

The Duke was killed in a plane crash on active service in World War II at Eagles Rock near Dunbeath, Caithness, Scotland on August 25, 1942. The Short Sunderland he was flying in was officially heading to Iceland where the Duke was to meet senior members of the US military. However the Duke's death at the height of World War II has led to various conspiracy theories surrounding the plane crash. Some theories state that the Duke was actually heading to Sweden for secret peace talks with the Germans. Related to this are claims that the Duke was travelling with Rudolf Hess, the deputy to Adolf Hitler; a reported additional, unexplained body at the scene of the crash has been attributed as Hess's, with the man later tried at Nuremberg allegedly an impostor. Other claims state the Duke was at the controls of the plane, and his inexperience may have caused the plane to crash.

In 2003, Channel 4 broadcast an alternative theory. This stated that the Duke was involved in the events surrounding the capture of Rudolf Hess. This theory however, states that the Duke was working with British Intelligence as part of a plot to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Duke was plotting with other senior figures to overthrow Winston Churchill.

Prince George's three children are still active members of the royal family - Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael of Kent.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

The Royal British Legion

Micky Burn

Micky Burn born 1912*

Michael 'Micky' Burn is an English journalist, commando, writer and poet.

Burn was born into a Roman Catholic family, and admits that in earlier life: 'I had been drawn to three autocracies: German National Socialism, Communism, and the Roman Catholic Church.' Burn's father was secretary and solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall became a trusted confidant of the King; while his mother's family was instrumental in developing the golf-and-gambling resort of Le Touquet.

Burn spent an amount of time in Florence, befriending Alice Keppel, the former mistress of Edward VII. A homosexual, his lovers included later Soviet Union spy Guy Burgess. On two occasions during the 1930s, plagued by threats of blackmail, Burn took himself to the police, as homosexuality was then a crime.

Burn was introduced to German National Socialism by Nancy Mitford, who in 1936 arranged for Burn to meet Adolf Hitler, who signed his copy of Mein Kampf.

Burn then agreed to join The Times newspaper as a foreign correspondent. When World War II broke out, Burn quickly shifted his politics to Marxism.

Burn joined what were initially termed 'independent companies' that were first called storm troops, later renamed Commandos. Burn's team initial engagement was in Norway in 1940, part of the unsuccessful Allied campaign to counter the German invasion.

Burn was commander of 6 Troop, 2 Commando and leader of all Commando parties of Group 2 as part of the 1942 St Nazaire Raid. Although five of his colleagues were awarded the Victoria Cross, Burn's team after a failed land based escape were captured

Burn was interrogated, and eventually sent to Colditz Castle, Oflag IV-C. His captors, perhaps noting his royal connections and tattered copy of Mein Kampf, he was well treated.

Burn gave lectures to prisoners at Colditz, however, but due to his pre-war interest in Nazi philosophy he was widely regarded with distrust and scorn. However, shorthand learnt for previous employment in journalism meant Burn acted as scribe to Colditz's secret radio operator, Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmy Yule.

On liberation, Burn sent dispatches to The Times about what had gone on in Colditz, published in the times on the 19th and 21st April 1945. Burn had written a novel during his stay, which was published as Yes, Farewell in 1946.

When the war ended The Times gave Burn his job back, wary of what to do with someone of Burn's convictions. By chance he was assigned to Hungary, where he resultantly became the main British reporter on the political purges, and the faked trial of József Cardinal Mindszenty.

Despite his homosexuality, Burn suddenly fell in love with a widow who coped devotedly with his occasional lapses until her death. His friends - Victor Rothschild, Bertrand Russell, the Baroness Budberg rallied to keep him company.

Burn has written five books of non-fiction, four novels and four books of poetry — including a Keats Poetry Award volume. He presently enjoys reading his poetry aloud at regional poetry events.

This profile may not be up to the standard of accuracy I hope to achieve so will hopefully be updated soon.

*actual date unknown