Baring, Maurice

(1874-1945)

   Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Baring was one of the family of Baring's Bank. Educated at Eton College, he left Trinity College, Cambridge, without graduating. Baring was a brilliant linguist with a varied career as a diplomat, journalist and war correspondent in Russia and the Balkans. During World War I he served with the Royal Flying Corps. He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and as officer of the Legion of Honor in 1935. In addition to his autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), he published several other novels and collections of stories, two non-fiction books and a book of great ghost stories. A painting of Baring, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc (1932) by James Gunn is shown on the National Portrait Gallery website. "The Dying Reservist" is a memorial to his many friends killed in World War I, where he speaks of the pain of their not hearing the song of the harvest home. Some of his other poems: "Ballad," "I Dare Not Pray to Thee," "Julian Grenfell" (see entry), "Moan in the Form of a Ballade."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). 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 Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company 1953. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.