On this date in 1873 the writer Walter de la Mare was born in Greenwich. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem The Listeners. 10 things you might not know about him:
He was descended from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants on his father’s side and the Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning on his mother’s. He is not any relation to the poet Robert Browning.
He disliked the name Walter and preferred to be known to his family and friends as “Jack”.
He worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. While he was there he began writing in his spare time, and eventually left when Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to get a Civil List pension, allowing him to write full time.
His first published short story, Kismet, appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895.
His collection of poetry, Songs of Childhood, was published in 1902.
While he’s probably best known for children’s poems, there was more to his writing career than that. He’s also known for his ghost stories, of which HP Lovecraft was a big fan. As well as a number of short stories, De la Mare wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910).
Richard Adams was also a fan and used several of de la Mare's poems as epigraphs in Watership Down.
He met his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, at the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club. She was ten years older than him.
He believed that all children are visionaries, starting life in possession of a “childlike imagination” but at some point the influence of the external world causes the childlike imagination to retreat “like a shocked Snail into its shell". It’s replaced by what he called a “boylike imagination” which is more logical and analytical. However, in the case of some, the childlike imagination grows bolder and able to face the world, and that is when you get artistic and intuitive people.
He died in 1956 of a coronary thrombosis. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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