Grenfell, Julian Henry Francis

(1888-1915)

   Born in London, the son of William Henry Grenfell, afterwards Baron Desborough, he was educated at Eton College and at Balliol College, Oxford. He was commissioned into the 1st (the Royal) Dragoons in 1910 and joined the regiment at Muttra, India. He served in France from 1914, was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and was mentioned in dispatches. He was killed at Ypres and was buried in the military cemetery on the hills above Boulogne. At Eton he contributed to the London World and Vanity Fair; was one of the editors of the Eton College Chronicle, and edited a clever but short-lived periodical called The Outsider. His poem "Into Battle" appeared in The Times on the day his death was announced. The poet laureate Robert Bridges (see entry) included the poem in his anthology The Spirit of Man (1916). He is memorialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey along with other poets of the First World War. Some of his other poems: "Hymn to the Wild Boar," "Prayer for Those on the Staff," "The Hills," "To a Black Greyhound."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War. I.M. Parsons, ed. Viking Press, 1965. Other Men's Flowers. A.P. Wavell, ed. Jonathan Cape, 1990. 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 Home Book of Modern Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. Henry Holt, 1953. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. War and the Poet: An Antholog y of Poetry Expressing Man's Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present. Richard Eberhart, and Selden Rodman, ed. Devin-Adair, 1945. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).