Lieut. T E Hulme (1883 – 1917)

The son of Thomas and Mary Hulme of Endon Bank, Thomas Ernest Hulme was a War Poet and a founder of the Imagist movement. Hewas educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme grammar school. There he developed an early interest in debate and was known by his school debating society as ‘The Whip’. There are local accounts of his speeding through the ford on his motorbike, with great enjoyment on his part. He courted controversy.

Disliking ‘Ernest’ as he was called by his family, Hulme called himself ‘Tommy’ once he had left home. He read mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge but failed to complete his degree being sent down twice from there. On the first occasion this was for rowdyism, where despite being a teetotaller he was a leading member of the Discord Club. Later he was expelled for trying to seduce a young girl, the daughter of the President of the Aristotelian Society and he fled the country for a while. On theatre visits he would shout out at the actors and on one occasion this led to a brawl with the Police and a weekend in prison. It is said that he kept a brass knuckle duster in his bedroom.

Hulme is often seen as a pioneer of Modernism. A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. The origins of Imagism are to be found in two of his poems, Autumn and A City Sunset.

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –

I walked abroad;

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

andround about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

He appreciated G K Chesterton’s views on the difference between old and new poetry: “the old dealt with the Siege of Troy, the new attempts to express the emotions of a boy fishing”.

Hulme was accredited with influencing Ezra Pound and was one of the first critics to write about modern painting and sculpture. His writings included critical essays and translations.

He trekked across Canada, taught English in Brussels, attended a meeting of the Philosophical Congress in Bologna and lectured to the Poets’ Club in London. His writings were published regularly in magazines.

Jacob Epstein, the sculptor, who was a close friend of his proudly noted that Hulme “was capable of kicking a theory as well as a man downstairs when the occasion demanded.” He had a forceful personality and a pugnacious style which made him particularly effective on the attack. His prose was brisk and epigrammatic and he could be brutal about his contemporaries, especially if they were critical of his friends.

He enlisted quickly when war came, but was wounded in April 1915 and sent home to recuperate. He wrote “War Notes” while convalescing, a subtle attack on the pacifism of Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell. The following year he was granted a commission in the Royal Marines Artillery and returned to the front.

“Diary from the Trenches” originated as letters to his family. His descriptions of life in the trenches were direct and incisive. His poem “Trenches: St Eloi” was described by a critic in The Guardian as “An unfamiliar kind of first world war poem …. deploying modernist techniques with stark power”. He published only six poems in his lifetime. He was described by T S Eliot as ‘classical, reactionary and revolutionary’.

T E Hulme was killed in action near Flanders in September 1917, aged 34. He suffered a direct hit from a large shell which literally blew him to pieces. His remains were buried in the Military Cemetery at Koksidje in Belgium and his name is recorded on the family vault in St Luke’s churchyard in Endon. A memorial window is installed in the North Aisle of the church, showing him as a soldier and a scholar, together with St Michael and St Augustine and a text from The Commendment of the Book of Common Prayer, which was found written on a scrap of paper among his possessions.