Frederic Manning (1882-1935) poet and novelist

Did you know that Frederic Manning had a connection with Staffordshire ?

Born in Sydney, Australia, Frederic came to Britain in 1903 with his family. He originally signed up as a private in the King’s Shropshire Regiment, then started officer training in Oxford in April 1916. From August 1916 he served with the 7th batallion at the Somme and Ancre, and returned to the UK in December 1916 to undertake further officer training at Whittington Barracks before joining the Royal Irish Regiment in Dublin in May 1917.

In 1917 he published a collection of poems under the title Ediola. This was a mixture of verse in his early style alongside war poems heavily influenced by the imagism of Ezra Pound, which deal with personal aims and ideals tempered in battle.

Middle Parts of Fortune, by Frederic Manning

“The air was alive with the rush and flutter of wings; it was ripped by screaming shells, hissing like tons of molten metal plunging suddenly into water, there was the blast and concussion of their explosion, men smashed, obliterated in sudden eruptions of earth, rent and strewn in bloody fragments, shells that were like hell-cats humped and spitting, little sounds, unpleasantly close, lie the plucking of tense strings, and something tangling his feet, tearing at his trousers and puttees as he stumbled over it, and then a face suddenly, an inconceivably distorted face, which raved and sobbed at him as he fell with it into a shell-hole.”

In 1929 he composed a novel, obviously autobiographical, about three soldiers’ experience of the trench nightmare, which is, perhaps, one of the finest works of its kind to emerge from the war.