Remembrance Day is approaching, and today marks our remembrance service in Chapel in which, by tradition, students hold photographs of the ODs who died during the First and Second World Wars and stand on the Chapel steps. 

In examining the scope of the tragedy of these conflicts, I find it is helpful to examine the lives which were tragically cut short that we commemorate today. Nowell Oxland (1890-1915), for example, was a promising poet and author who was killed during the landing at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli. He is remembered alongside William Noel Hodgson as one of the two war poets Durham School produced. 

In 1901, Nowell's father, the Reverend William Oxland, accepted the living of St. Augustine's Church at Alston in Cumbria. Moving to the area at the age of 10, Nowell Oxland was fascinated by the remote moorland landscape, enough that much of his poetry revolves around his fascination with the Cumbrian landscape. Nowell joined the school in 1903; in 1905, William Noel Hodgson also entered as a King's Scholar, and the two, joined by a shared Cumberland heritage and a love of poetry, became fast friends. 

The two were high achievers, taking prominent roles in the Debate Club; Oxland rowed in the Boat Club and played on the 1st XV 1907-1909. From 1908 he was Head of School, and was well-respected by students and staff alike. 

The end of his time at the school was somewhat ignominious, however. He left in June 1910 without taking the Oxford entry exams, and was forced to spend a year cramming for the qualifications before entering Worcester College, Oxford. The Bursar of the college would later recall that 'I knew he had left Durham under a cloud but what it was I did not enquire.' What exactly happened is a mystery, but William Noel Hodgson's short story Ascension Morning, written on the 22nd June 1916, contains the following telling paragraph: "…there came upon me remembrance of a valley in my own country on such another Ascension morning as this, when, breakfast being at nine o'clock, I and another, noble heart whom I shall not meet again, climbed out of the lower study window before the sun was up, and set off to the country. And I remembered the chill of the water around our middles as we forded the river, where the mist still hung in wreaths, and the heavy dew on the grass. We took a grebe's nest, I remembered, and a reed warbler's, but missed a kestrel, being pursued by the slaves of the rich. I remembered, too, how, as we sat in a cottage and ate lemon-curd and bread, a clock struck eight; and how we girded ourselves and ran, and were in time for call over at nine, whereby was great renown to us for many days; and how I slept in my oaken seat at matins." 

Charlotte Zeepvat, whose 2014 biography of William Noel Hodgson is close to definitive, poses the theory that this escapade did not end as well as Hodgson describes here. Oxland, being the head of school, would have been held to a certain standard of responsibility, and leading a younger boy to break bounds would have been seen as a breach of trust. He would have been too old for the cane, but being forced to arrange his own entrance to Oxford would have been seen as a suitable punishment. 

It is while at Oxford that Oxland wrote much of the poetry and stories he would later become famous for. While he is regarded as a war poet, much of the contents of his 1917 collection, Poems and Stories, do not mention the war. Several are also overtly comedic. 

One poem, In the 'Radcliffe' – Oxford, takes the metrical rhyme scheme of Swinburne's The Garden of Proserpine and applies it to the plight of the undergraduate distracted from his work in the library. Oxland continued the pastiche by using the form of Swinburne's A Forsaken Garden to examine an alternate scenario, If Swinburne had lived at a boarding-house in Putney, instead of at 'The Pines'. The result would be that the poet would be far less concerned with the tragedy of memory and far more preoccupied with the range of disappointing food available (Cold mutton that climbs without reason/ Mint sauce and the title of 'lamb',/ The clammy white pork out of season/ The deadly alternative, ham"). 

In terms of his short stories, some are comedic, such as the farcical The Mollification of Mabel, while some, such as the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired The Ten Fingers, explore horror. Of the eighteen poems and seven short stories contained in his collection, only one relates to the First World War. Oxland wrote it on the voyage out to Gallipoli, and it was sent home in a letter to family friend and schoolteacher Amy Hawthorn, with whom Oxland shared all of his manuscripts. This was initially published in The Times in 1915 as 'Outward Bound'; when it was reprinted in Oxland's posthumous Poems and Stories, it was tellingly retitled 'Farewell'. 

The poem narrates his feelings leaving his beloved Cumberland, and wonders if, upon his death, his "embers" will drift through the wind from the Dardenelles back home. It concludes with the following two verses: 

'Though the high gods smite and slay us, 
Though we come not whence we go,
As the host of Menelaus

Came there many years ago;
Yet the self-same wind shall bear us
From the same departing-place
Out across the Gulf of Saros

And the peaks of Samothrace.
We shall pass in summer weather,

We shall come at eventide,

Where the fells stand up together
And all quiet things abide;
Mixed with cloud and wind and river,
Sund-distilled in dew and train,
One with Cumberland for ever,
We shall go not forth again.'

His journey to the Dardanelles with the 6th Border Regiment took place in late June 1915. He took part in the Suvla Bay landing on the 7th August, and was killed in action two days later. The poem Farewell was published on the 27th August. 

When William Noel Hodgson, after an evening digging trenches, saw Oxland's name published in the casualty lists, he burned some moss that his sister had sent from home in a symbolic funeral ceremony. His father had his own means of memorial. To commemorate his son, Reverend William Oxland commissioned two panels to be painted in the Church of St. Augustine, Alston. 

Both of these featured the likeness of Nowell Oxland, with one representing him as Saint Michael and the other as Saint George. His soul had returned to his father's church, in his childhood home of Cumberland; he shall not go forth again.