Alan Ross extract One

Alan Ross The Making of a Poet 

photograph FL 2837 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 8308-29) in the Public Domain , courtesy of Wikipedia and the IWM. 

In various blog posts I have written about the 'War at Sea' poetry of Alan Ross ( 1922- 2001)  and am hoping to transform various fragments into a longer study. One disadvantage is that I have not been able to trace the copyright holder to his work. Please get in contact if you  know who they are. 

Th work of Alan Ross falls broadly into three categories, War, Cricket and his Indian childhood. Ross was born in Calcutta, was sent to school in England at the age of seven,though returned to India regularly until 1937.  He was educated at  Haileybury and then St John's College, Oxford joining the Royal Navy on his 20th birthday in 1942. Ross began his war service as an Ordinary Rating on the lower decks, on board destroyers, serving in an Arctic Convoy, then the North Sea. After two years Ross joined the staff of the 16th Destroyer Flotilla, later to become an Intelligence Officer.

Already getting published during World War 2 simply by sending poetry to magazines and anthologies- John Lehman was the first to publish him in 'Penguin New Writing. Lehman introduced Ross to a circle of writers and painters, and also to Osbert Sitwell. Ross was later to recall arriving in his sailor's uniform to attend a Sitwell soiree and having a quick conversation on the stairs with a man wearing a raincoat who was just leaving , who turned out to be E M Foster.

 Once demobbed Alan Ross became a travel writer, cricket corespondent, magazine  editor, author, and carried on writing poetry. Immersed in the charming  literary world of the second half of the 20th century, his autobiographical writing is fragmented :Accounts of Alan Ross' naval service and its immediate aftermath can be found in his autobiographical 'Blindfold Games (1986); The book's title is from Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Tin Fish'
"They play their grisly blindfold games
in little boxes made of tin."

One neglected collection of literary work that was published during Word War 2 is the 'Transformation' anthologies edited by Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece. 'Transformation 2' (1944)  listed contributors included poet and art critic Herbert Read, educationalist A.S.Neil. Richard Church, Stephen Spender, Morwenna Donnelly.....Henry Miller was the most well know writer. And an Alan Ross poem 'Waterfront' was included therein. The poem is not particular inspiring, a dreary description of humdrum port life being portrayed as some sort of awkward metaphor for a wider social malaise. Thankfully was not re-published. On the back cover of 'Transformations '  Ross was acknowledged 

Was born in 1918 and educated in India and Oxford. He is now serving in a destroyer' 

Ross was in fact born in 1922.  He was serving,as we have seen as an Ordinary Rating and  now being published alongside Spender and Read. Certainly an achievement for a 'War at Sea' poet. 

Alan Ross reflected on his attitude to War in 1975 in the introduction to a collection of his past poetry 'Open Sea'

"Reading the poems again, I am aware that they show no particular distaste for, or reaction against, the idea of war. They simply assume its particular necessity, an attitude I neither questioned at the time nor do now. The boredom, the misery and the waste were part of a larger experience that remains in many incidents, as vivid to me as when it took place."

 Ross went on to say

"I can think of no one I served with who resented the reasons for the war against Nazi Germany, however intolerable they may have found the reality."

I think it is the great American scholar Elizabeth Vaniver who warned against the 'privileging of the anti-war voice' when looking at war poetry. Certainly Ross was to experience the full onslaught of war at the Battle of Barents Sea, at the age of 20, and write about it in an epic poem 'J.W.51B'

Another anthology of World War 2 writing is 'Leaves in the Storm- A book of Diaries' edited by Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece' , published in 1947. Alan Ross contributed a prose extract titled Arctic Convoy , about his time on board HMS ONSLOW

"AM ENGAGING THE ENEMY. Sea tilts over the bows, the wake zig-zags fiercely, time is contracted, a pin point. Far on the starboard horizon, the convoy turns south; a smoke-screen is put up like a wall by a destroyer, spouting grey belches like a train. Suddenly orange  is flung from the port quarter, long lean tongues forked from the enemy's mouth, soundless, in shafts of belched colour like a bridge striving to reach out and across. Like whales flicking, spouts of silky water explode in plumes, soundless. Again the orange tongue unleashes itself, flashing in flamingo streams of flame. World is become electric, power-wrecked, three feathers of water explode across the smoke, a low driven note."

ENDS