Ross, Alan

(1922-2001)

   Born in Calcutta, where he spent the first seven years of his life, he was educated in Falmouth, Cornwall, then went up to St. John's College, Oxford, in 1940 to read modern languages; there he also represented the university at both cricket and squash. From 1941 to 1947, he was in the Royal Navy, saw service on the Russian convoys and ended as interpreter to the British Naval commander in chief, Germany. After the war he became a journalist and started writing travel books, and in 1949 he married Jennifer Fry, the heiress of the chocolate company. He was sports writer for The Observer in 1950, cricket correspondent in 1953, then editor of the London Magazine from 1961 until he died. The Derelict Day, Poems from Germany (1947) and Something of the Sea: Poems 1942-52 (1954) reflect his experience of the war. J.W. 51BA Convoy celebrates the heroism and the exhilaration, as well as the horror, of a naval battle, and is considered the finest narrative poem of World War II. Some of his poems: "At Only That Moment," "Cricket at Oxford," "Destroyers in the Arctic," "Mess Deck Casualty," "Stanley Matthews," "Survivors," "The Boathouse."

   Sources: A Literature of Sports. Tom Dodge, ed. D.C. Heath and Company, 1980. Erotic Poetry: The Lyrics, Ballads, Idylls, and Epics of Love - Classical to Contemporary. William Cole, ed. Random House, 1963. Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Francis Turner Palgrave, ed. Oxford University Press, 1964, Sixth edition, updated by John Press, 1994. Peace and War: A Collection of Poems. Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, eds. Oxford University Press, 1989. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Yorker Book of Poems. The New Yorker editors. Viking Press, 1969. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).