May Wedderburn Cannan (14 October 1893 – 11 December 1973) was a
British poet who was active in
World War I.
Biography
Early life
May was the second of three daughters of Charles Cannan,
Dean of
Trinity College, Oxford (he was in charge at the
Oxford University Press from 1895 until his death in 1919).
In 1911, at the age of 18, she joined the
Voluntary Aid Detachment, training as a nurse and eventually reaching the rank of
Quartermaster. Sharon Ouditt, writing of women's role in the war, noted that: "For the nurses it was, like the nun's cross, the badge of their equal sacrifice." In a poem by May Wedderburn Cannan the
Red Cross sign is seen to be equivalent to the crossed swords indicating her lover's death in battle:
During the war, she went to
Rouen
Rouen (, ; or ) is a city on the River Seine in northern France. It is the prefecture of the Regions of France, region of Normandy (administrative region), Normandy and the Departments of France, department of Seine-Maritime. Formerly one of ...
in the spring of 1915, helping to run the
canteen
{{Primary sources, date=February 2007
Canteen is an Australian national support organisation for young people (aged 12–25) living with cancer; including cancer patients, their brothers and sisters, and young people with parents or primary carers ...
at the railhead there for four weeks, then returning to help her father at the Oxford University Press, but finally returning to
France in the
espionage department at the
War Office Department in
Paris (1918), where she was finally reunited with her fiancé
Bevil Quiller-Couch
Major Bevil Bryan Quiller-Couch MC (12 October 1890 – 6 February 1919) was a decorated British Army officer who served continuously in Flanders and France from August 1914 to 1918. He was the son of the Cornish writer, Sir Arthur Quiller-Co ...
.
Cannan published three volumes of poetry during and after the war. These were ''In War Time'' (1917), ''The Splendid Days'' (1919) which was dedicated to Bevil Quiller-Couch, and ''The House of Hope'' (1923), dedicated to her father. In 1934, she wrote one novel ''The Lonely Generation''.
Philip Larkin chose her poem "Rouen" to be included in the ''
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
''The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse'' is a poetry anthology edited by Philip Larkin. It was published in 1973 by Oxford University Press with . Larkin writes in the short preface that the selection is wide rather than deep; and a ...
'' (1973), commenting that it "had all the warmth and idealism of the VADS in the First World War. I find it enchanting".
Later life
Although Cannan ceased writing for publication in the 1920s, in her final years she completed an autobiographical work entitled ''Grey Ghosts and Voices'' (1976). The book looks back to her
Edwardian childhood, the war years and those years immediately afterwards.
Further unpublished poems, from a handwritten notebook, were published in ''The Tears of War'' (2000) by her great-niece Charlotte Fyfe, which also tells the story of her love affair with Bevil Quiller-Couch through autobiographical extracts and the letters from Bevil to Cannan.
Family
She was the sister of the novelist
Joanna Cannan. She was the daughter of the academic
Charles Cannan and cousin to the British novelist and playwright
Gilbert Cannan
Gilbert Eric Cannan (25 June 1884 – 30 June 1955) was a British novelist and dramatist.
Early life
Born in Manchester of Scottish descent, he got on badly with his family, and in 1897 he was sent to live in Oxford with the economist Edwin Ca ...
. She is also aunt to the
Pullein-Thompson sisters and the British dramatist and playwright
, and a great-aunt of
Charlotte Popescu (Christine Pullein-Thompson's daughter).
She was engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, son of Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch. Bevil served as gunner in World War I, and survived without injury only to die in the
Spanish flu pandemic
A pandemic () is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic (epidemiology), endemic disease wi ...
in 1919. She subsequently married Percival James Slater, a
balloonist in World War I, and promoted to
Brigadier in
World War II.
Radio programme
In 2002,
BBC Radio 4 presented a dramatised version of ''The Tears of War'' as the afternoon play for
Armistice Day.
Bibliography
*"Recollections of a British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment, No. 12, May Wedderburn Cannan, (1971) Oxford University, March 26th, 1911-April 24, 1919", TS.
*In War Time, Oxford, May Wedderburn Cannan, 1917.
*The Splendid Days, May Wedderburn Cannan, Blackwell, 1919.
*The House of Hope, May Wedderburn Cannan, 1923.
*Grey Ghosts and Voices, May Wedderburn Cannan; Roundwood Press; 1976;
*The Tears of War: The Love Story of a Young Poet and a War Hero, May Wedderburn Cannan; Publisher: Cavalier Books; 2000;
*First World War Poems by Andrew Motion, Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Helen Mackay, Julian Grenfell, W.B. Yeats, May Wedderburn Cannan, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Edward Thomas; Publisher: Faber and Faber; 2003;
*'Great Expectations': Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets, Gill Plain, Feminist Review, No. 51 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 41–65
*Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War., Sharon Ouditt, Routledge,1994.
References
External links
*maywedderburncannan.wordpress.com
Extracts from her autobiography, Grey Ghosts and VoicesPoem: RouenPoem: Lamplight
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20070202111737/http://aspirations.english.cam.ac.uk/converse/gcse/cannan.acds May Wedderburn Cannan - a poet and a woman in the First World Warbr>The story of how Charlotte Fyfe came to collate The Tears of War, Daily Telegraph, 2000
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cannan, May
1893 births
1973 deaths
English women poets
English World War I poets
British women in World War I
20th-century English women writers
20th-century English poets