Today on Remembrance Sunday, the work of the First World War poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sasson are still well known. In this story we look at a war poet from Kilburn who is forgotten.
In 1889, Leslie Coulson was born as Frederick Leslie Allen-Coulson at 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn. His father Frederick Raymond Coulson came from a poor family in Bury Lancashire who moved to Mile End in east London. Frederick had hyphened his surname and called himself Allen-Coulson by 1883 when he married Ada Mary Ann Emery on Christmas Day in St Mary’s Stratford Bow.
In 1887 when their first son Raymond was baptised in Christ Church Brondesbury, they were living in three rooms on the first and second floors of 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn (this was probably later re-numbered as today's No.70). Frederick was a warehouseman.
At the time of the 1891 census, they had moved across the Kilburn High Road to 9 Dunster Gardens. Frederick now aged 26, was a shipping clerk and Ada was 25. Frederick became a newspaper columnist on The Sunday Chronicle and moved from Kilburn to Crouch End, and then to Golders Green.
He sent his sons to a modest but progressive Norfolk boarding school in New Hunstanton, which fostered their imagination, love of nature and the principles of gentleness and justice. Both Leslie and Raymond followed in their father’s footsteps and became journalists.
Leslie was a reporter on The Evening News and in 1914 he moved to The Standard as an assistant foreign editor. When war broke out, he enlisted as a private in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. He left England on Christmas Eve 1914. The battalion went first to Malta but in October 1915, after a month’s training in Egypt, was shipped to Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula. After twelve weeks in and out of the lines came the evacuation to Egypt. Coulson was taken to hospital, suffering from a fever.
Re-joining his unit, in April 1916 the battalion went to France, where it was disbanded. Coulson, now a sergeant, was sent to the 12th London Battalion (the Rangers) who on 1 July were in the diversionary attack on the Gommecourt salient north of the main Somme offensive. The Rangers lost 17 of their 23 officers and 498 of the 780 other ranks that day.
On 7 October the Rangers took part in the battle for the Transloy Ridges. Coulson, was in the first wave of the attack when he was shot in the chest by a sniper. He died the next day at the casualty clearing station and was buried in the Grove Town Cemetery, Meaulte, France.
Leslie’s poems were collected and published in a slim volume by his father in 1917. ‘From an Outpost and Other Poems’, sold more than 10,000 copies that year and quickly went through four impressions.
The last verse of ‘The Rainbow’ conveys Leslie’s feelings of being in the trenches:
When night falls dark we creep
In silence to our dead.
We dig a few feet deep
And leave them there to sleep
But blood at night is red,
Yea, even at night,
And a dead mans face is white.
And I dry my hands, that are also trained to kill,
And I look at the stars for the stars are beautiful still.
The poem ‘Who Made the Law’ became his best known when it appeared in the collection, 'Poetry of the Great War', edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (1986).
Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?
Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?
Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?
Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?
Who made the Law?
Who made the Law that Death should stalk the village?
Who spake the word to kill among the sheaves,
Who gave it forth that death should lurk in hedgerows,
Who flung the dead among the fallen leaves?
Who made the Law?
Those who return shall find that peace endures,
Find old things old, and know the things they knew,
Walk in the garden, slumber by the fireside,
Share the peace of dawn, and dream amid the dew
Those who return.
Those who return shall till the ancient pastures,
Clean-hearted men shall guide the plough-horse reins,
Some shall grow apples and flowers in the valleys,
Some shall go courting in summer down the lanes –
THOSE WHO RETURN.
But who made the Law? The Trees shall whisper to him:
“See, see the blood – the splashes on our bark!”
Walking the meadows, he shall hear bones crackle,
And fleshless mouths shall gibber in silent lanes at dark.
Who made the Law?
Who made the Law? At noon upon the hillside
His ears shall hear a moan, his cheeks shall feel a breath,
And all along the valleys, past gardens, crofts, and homesteads,
HE who made the Law,
He who made the Law,
He who made the Law shall walk along with Death.
Who made the Law?
Discussing the poem in 2007 Vivien Whelpton says, ‘Until its close this poem might be read as a political statement, but the final stanza reveals it as a spiritual outcry. It is God who has betrayed the human race’. She goes on to say, ‘But it is principally about the waste of human life. It is remarkable for its anger, its humanity, its foresight and its form. And it was written in September 1916, barely half-way through the war’.
His father Frederick died in 1922 at 68 Corringham Road Golders Green from influenza and pneumonia. He was a columnist for 25 years under the pen name of ‘Vexatus’ for The Sunday Chronicle.
Further tragedy followed, and three years later son Raymond shot himself with his service revolver in the garden of the Golders Green house where he lived with his mother Ada. He had suffered a nervous breakdown a few weeks previously and was very depressed. He was 37 and left a note saying he was going to kill himself and his mother Ada Mary. As the coroner said at the inquest; luckily, she slept with her door locked.
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