Spencer, Charles Bernard

(1909-1963)

   Born in Madras, where his father, Sir Charles Gordon Spencer, was a High Court Judge, he was brought up in Hampshire and Oxfordshire. Educated at Marlborough College, he graduated from Oxford in 1932, then scratched a living from teaching and writing. In 1936 he married the actress Norah Gibbs. In 1939 he started working for the British Council and was transferred from Greece to Egypt in early 1941. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1947 and Bernard himself was treated for the disease in a Swiss clinic, and after a year's convalescence he was posted to Madrid in 1949. He found happiness again when he married Anne Marjoribanks in 1961. He was accidentally killed in Vienna. Some of his publications: Aegean Islands and Other Poems, 1946. The Twist in the Plotting, 1960. With Luck Lasting, 1963. Some of his poems: "Aegean Islands 1940-41," "Castanets," "Egyptian Dancer at Shubra," "Greek Excavations," "Olive Trees," "Part of Plenty," "The Empire Clock," "Yachts on the Nile."

   Sources: Collected Poems of Bernard Spencer. Alan Ross, 1965. Collected Poems of Bernard Spencer. Roger Bowen, 1981. Dance in Poetry: An International Anthology of Poems on Dance. Alkis Raftis, ed. Princeton Book Company, 1991. The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955. Cecil Day Lewis and John Lehmann, eds. Chatto and Windus, 1966. 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 British Poets: An Anthology. Kenneth Rexroth, ed. New Directions, 1949. The Oxford Book of Travel Verse. Kevin Crossley-Holland, ed. Oxford University Press, 1986. University of Reading, Papers of Bernard Spencer (http://www.library.rdg.ac.uk/colls/special/spencer.html). Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).