It has been estimated that the First World War provoked the writing of 1.5 million poems.

Poems by soldier-poets on all sides of the conflict have been collected and published in sundry volumes over the years.

The poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Georg Trakl, among others, are part of the culture of that period of European history. So too are poems written by non-combatants such as Rudyard Kipling and Laurence Binyon.

Binyon’s poem For The Fallen includes one four-line verse which, more than the other six verses, still speaks for many people the world over:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

It was published in The Times on September 21, 1914. Binyon, who worked for the British Museum, went to the Western Front as a Red Cross orderly in 1916. After the war he returned to the Museum.

War poetry or poetry about the war was not the sole preserve of men. You could expect anthologies of First World War poetry to include poems by Charlotte Mew, Vera Brittan and Margaret Postgate. There should also be a place for Alberta Vickridge, the Bradford-born poet whose work was admired by J B Priestley and Agatha Christie.

Her reputation has been rescued from obscurity by former Bradford University lecturer Colin Neville, who pointed out that in her lifetime she had nine books of poems published and in 1924 won a Bard’s Crown and Bardic Chair at an Eisteddfod for her long poem The Forsaken Princess.

She ran her own printing company alone in the attic of her home in Beamsley House, Frizinghall. Because of the mother’s delicate health, the family tended to spend the winter months in Torquay, a place Alberta was very fond of.

It was in Devon that Alberta decided she needed to contribute to the war effort, and it was here she volunteered to join the Voluntary Aid Detachment in late 1917.

The VAD scheme was established in 1910 to provide volunteers to support the professional military nursing service during times of emergency. The organisation expanded quickly after the outbreak of war in August 1914 and numbered 80,000 volunteers by 1916.

Alberta worked as a nurse at the Red Cross Town Hall Hospital in Torquay. The young Agatha Christie also lived and worked here as a nurse and edited a literary magazine to which Alberta contributed.

“We know from Agatha Christie’s letter to Alberta (in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds) that Christie admired Alberta’s work and that the two women had struck up a friendship at this time,” says Colin.

Badly wounded British soldiers from the campaigns in France, Flanders and Gallipoli began to arrive at the hospital, followed by wounded soldiers from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

In September 1918, there was also a serious outbreak of influenza nationwide and more than 100 US servicemen died at another Torquay Hospital in just a fortnight.

Alberta would have been at the centre of this activity and wrote two of her most anthologised poems about her nursing experiences: Out Of Conflict and In A VAD Pantry.

When the war ended, Alberta stayed on in Torquay for a while and worked on a book of poetry containing war poems and a selection of others. She submitted the collection to MacDonald’s, the publisher, who accepted it. The Sea Gazer was published in 1919.

Alberta Vickridge’s Poems from The Sea Gazer

OUT OF CONFLICT
The ward is strangely hushed today;
The morning nurses, sober-eyed,
Recall the screened space, where, they say,
At midnight Number Twenty died.
So many weeks of weary hours
He lay and heard our busy tread,
As patient as the wistful flowers
That spent their fragrance near his bed –
So oft we saw, in passing by,
His questing glance, his dreadful face,
We shall regard resentfully
The stranger that must fill his place...

What vision rapt him through the dim
Slow hours? Like wraiths upon the sight
All common changes seem to him
Of dawn and day, of eve and night;
Each brought its sounds of whispering feet,
Its faces, glimmering, ghost by ghost;
Yet scarce he left his dream to greet
Those comers who would mourn him most.
For in his sight shone such a star
As, after tempers loud and rude,
To sea-worn eyes foretells some far
Relief – a port of quietude;
And, homing to that bourn, he heard
The call so many wanderers know
From meadows lulled by bee and bird
Where he was happy long ago –

Where simple things were ecstasy,
And life a game among the flowers,
And every hurt and malady
Was healed by gentler hands than ours…
Not jacinth wall and golden street
Perchance so rapt his dying gaze;
For him, Heaven’s wonder was the sweet
Lost wonder of his childhood’s days;
Perchance he sought no blissful shore,
No place among the myriad blest,
But just to lay, a child once more,
His tired head on his mother’s breast.

Ah, well, today all dreams come true
For those closed eyes where riddles cease;
He leaves the warring world he knew,
And ratifies, ere we, his peace.
God rest him, then… but we must turn
To face the same sad tasks again –
To tend new convoys, and discern
The same dream in the eyes of pain.

IN A VAD PANTRY
Pots in piles of blue and white,
Old in service, cracked and chipped–
While the bare-armed girls tonight
Rinse and dry, with trivial-lipped
Mirth, and jests, and giggling chatter,
In this maze of curls and clatter
Is there no one sees in you
More than common white and blue?

When the potter trimmed your clay’s
Sodden mass to his desire–
Washed you in the viscid glaze
That is clarified by fire–
When he sold your sort in lots,
Reckoning such as common pots–
Did he not at times foresee
Sorrow in your destiny?

Lips of fever, parched for drink
From this vessel seek relief
Ah, so often, that I think
Many a sad Last Supper’s grief
Haunts it still– that they who died,
In man’s quarrel crucified,
Shed a nimbus strange and pale
Round about this humble Grail.