S.J.H. Durnford: OS Second World War Poet

2nd Lieutenant S.J.H. Durnford, Royal Regiment of Artillery, December 1940.

Stanley John Harper Durnford (1920-1995), author, poet, soldier, and schoolmaster.

John attended Sherborne School (School House) from January 1934 to July 1938, where he already showed great promise as a writer, winning the English Verse prize in three successive years (1936, 1937, 1938), the Barnes Elocution prize (1938), and the Longmuir English prize (1938). He was also editor of the School magazine, The Shirburnian, and a member of the School shooting viii team (1938).

In the introduction to a collection of his poetry, Immortal Diamond (1975), John provided the following autobiographical note:

‘The author was born in Edinburgh, and being also of ancient West Country stock, grew up in Somerset. He was educated at Sherborne and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, joining the Royal Artillery in September 1939. He served with the Lanarkshire Yeomanry as a Territorial officer in action from the Siamese Frontier to the last days of the battle for Singapore in 1941-42. Was a Prisoner-of-War in Siam from 1942-1945 enduring the hardships such as starvation, personal assaults, and the epidemic diseases such as dysentery, malaria and cholera almost without medical assistance.’

John was born at 20 Melville Street, Edinburgh on the 9 March 1920, the only child of Major Norman Stanley Maton Durnford ASC (1889-1965) and Agnes Watson Durnford (née Harper) (1888-1976), daughter of Ebenezer Erksine Harper, Sheriff Substitute of Selkirkshire, who had married on the 2 July 1918 at Mayfield United Free Church in Edinburgh.

From 1928 to 1933, John attended Naish House School in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and from January 1934 to July 1938 at Sherborne School where he was a member of School House. At the School’s Commemoration Day on 18 June 1938, John was awarded the honour of writing and reciting the ‘Prologue’, which took the form of an address to the assembled governors, masters, boys and visitors in poetic form.

In November 1938, John went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge to read history, but left after three terms and in September 1939 joined the Royal Artillery, training as a Gunner at Bulford in Wiltshire. In May 1941 John was seconded to the Lanarkshire Yeomanry and served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the North Malayan Campaign from December 1941 until the fall of Singapore on the 15 February 1942, when he was one of the 100,000 allied troops captured by the Japanese.

In October 1942, John was sent with 21,000 other PoWs to the Khanburi camps in Thailand (formerly Siam) to work on building the railway over the River Kwai – the Japanese strategic railway from Thailand to the Burma Frontier. During his three year ordeal he endured starvation, dysentery, malaria and cholera, but throughout he managed to write poems, mostly at night by the light of a lamp made from a tin filled with coconut oil. These poems were later published in two volumes, Immortal Diamond (1975) and A Form of Consolation. Poems, 1942-1945 (1984). He also later wrote an account of his time as a PoW in Branch Line to Burma (1958), which included a foreword by Admiral of the Fleet The Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

Sketch from *A Form of Consolation Poems 1942-1945* (1984).

On the 16 August 1945 news reached the Khanburi PoW camp that the Japanese had surrendered, an account of which John described in his poem ‘V.J. Day, Khanburi’. John was liberated on the 2 September 1945 and repatriated from Rangoon to Southampton on the P&O liner Corfu, arriving in Southampton on 7 October 1945, the first of twenty-two ships carrying Far East PoWs to dock there. John described the feelings he experienced that day in two poems, ‘Repatriation’ and ‘Southampton’, and later wrote in the introduction to A Form of Consolation. Poems, 1942-1945 (1984), ‘It was an interesting home-coming. Neither medical experts, families nor friends knew what to make of those they had last seen four years before. We scarcely knew what to expect of docks, railways, cars, buses, radios, houses and telephones ourselves, having spent most of the interval working as native labourers in a tropical climate for a twelve hour day. Most terrible of ironies, wives had re-married and sweethearts had not waited. Regarding those they loved as not only missing, but probably dead.’

In September 1946 he was given a Regular Commission in the Royal Artillery (RA), and from 1946 to 1949 was Training Officer and Battery Captain with the National Service Training Regiment RA. In 1949 John qualified as a Pilot on the Army Air Observation Post course at Middle Wallop, and from 1950 to 1952 he served as a Flight Officer with 657 Air Observation Post Squadron, attached to the 3rd Infantry Division, and saw service in Egypt and Libya. He suffered a breakdown when flying in North Africa and was invalided from the Army in 1953.

During the 1960’s John taught English at a school in Bristol and was remembered by a former pupil as a very inspiring teacher.

Stanley John Harper Durnford died on the 11 August 1995, aged 75.

With grateful thanks to John Durnford’s family for their generous help and contributions.

Rachel Hassall
School Archivist

Publications by John Durnford:
S.J.H. Durnford, Branch Line to Burma (London, MacDonald, 1958). Preface by S.J.H. Durnford, October 1957.

S.J.H. Durnford, Immortal Diamond (Ilfracombe, A.H. Stockwell Ltd., 1975). ISBN 7223 0750-0.
The volume contains fifty-two poems arranged into sections (Poems 1942-1945; Poems 1946-1949; Later Poems). Of the fifteen poems in ‘Poems 1942-1945’, four were later published in A Form of Consolation. Poems, 1942-1945 (1984).
In the preface, Durnford writes, ‘These few poems are given most willingly to the world, trusting they will help others to recall that whether in agonies of personal strife at home, in business, in peace of war, in whatever dark vale of mind, body or spirit they may find themselves, overhead are always “the everlasting arms” and the angel hosts… Even in the desperate days of wartime captivity, such as in Siam, good men and women, whether Christian, Buddhist, Shintoist, Hindu or whatever faith they possessed, were found to be healing and stilling the conflicts of war not so much by word as by quiet example. In the faith that all races will learn a similar humility of spirit, and by banishing old rivalries, pretences and wrongs, begin to remove the need for further conflicts, these few poems are humbly offered. Just as the hand of a former German soldier once placed a tree in a Dorset monastery garden for the same strange purpose of glory. “AMEN. AMEN. AMEN.” ‘

S.J.H. Durnford, A Form of Consolation. Poems, 1942-1945 (Box, J. Durnford, 1984).
The volume contains seven poems written between 1942 and 1945.
Durnford dedicated the volume ‘to those who did come home in October 1945, and for those who made homes for them.’

Victor Selwyn (ed.), Poems of the Second World War: the Oasis Selection (Everyman’s Classics, 1985), includes ‘Lying Awake at Night’ and ‘Prisoner of War Mail’.

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