First World War: Commemorations

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap because I wanted to put on the record a memory of Robert Sterling, a first cousin of my mother’s who volunteered at the beginning of the war in the autumn of 1914, having previously won the Newdigate prize at Oxford for poetry. He was held to be a coming poet. He went to France in March 1915. He wrote a very few poems in the trenches but, sadly, he was killed near Ypres only a month later, in April 1915.