Book focus on Shrewsbury years of poetry great
For Shrewsbury, Wilfred Owen was just another unremarkable young lad growing up in the town, and for Wilfred, Shrewsbury was the rather boring place where he was growing up.
He is today recognised as one of the greatest of poets of the Great War, and Shrewsbury is celebrating its connection with a series of events to mark the centenary year of his death in action, which came just a week before the conflict ended.
And now Helen McPhail from Shrewsbury, who chaired the Wilfred Owen Association for several years and also knew Wilfred's late nephew Peter Owen, has written what is billed as the first book to focus on Owen's family life and schoolboy years in the county town.
"When we were discussing what we could do for the centenary I said I could do a short book about Shrewsbury and about his growing up in Shrewsbury, this particular young man nobody had any idea would be anything special," she said.
"He did not write about it much. He thought it was not a very exciting place. He enjoyed his school very much, where he was obviously very well taught – this is the technical college which is an educational site still – and was able to explore his interests in botany and geology.
"He does not write about the beauty of the town, but he writes about the river quite often. It was just the place where he lived."
Helen says a lot of Owen's Shrewsbury is easily identifiable today, and there are still the same sort of people living equivalent lives.
"He was an unknown young man with a very uncertain future as far as Shrewsbury was concerned, apart from family and friends who knew he was highly literate and wrote very good letters.
"As a poet, he had no identity locally, except among teachers who thought he was working hard at it. Nobody had any sense of him being a future great writer of any kind."
Her book is both aimed at those who have perhaps heard of Owen but do not know much about Shrewsbury, and those who perhaps know Shrewsbury well and are less aware of Owen's formative years there.
Helen says that at the time of Owen's death – he was cut down by machine gun fire on November 4, 1918 – he had only five poems published.
"It was not until about the 1960s that he gained a reputation outside a particular body of literature, as it were."
She added that the Wilfred Owen Association was holding its annual meeting in Shrewsbury on September 15 and would be making its award for poetry, made every two years, to Owen Sheers, from the Brecon Beacons area.
