Roy Campbell (poet) - The Second World War

The Second World War

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Campbell denounced Nazi Germany and returned to Britain. He did duty as an Air Raid Precautions warden in London. During this period he met and befriended Dylan Thomas, a fellow alcoholic, with whom he once ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David's Day. Although he was over draft age and in bad physical shape, as well as having a bad hip, Campbell finally managed to get enlisted in the British Army. He was accepted by the Intelligence Corps because of his knowledge of languages and began training as a private with the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 1 April 1942. Having completed basic training, Campbell was transferred in July to the I.C. Depot near Winchester, where he was trained in motorcycles. In February 1943 he was promoted to sergeant, and in March he was posted to British East Africa. On 5 May, he arrived in Nairobi and was attached to the King's African Rifles, serving in a camp two miles outside the city. After having worked as a military censor he was transferred in June to the 12th Observation Unit of the commando force being trained for jungle warfare against the Japanese. However, any hope of seeing real action in the Far East was thwarted when Campbell during training in late July suffered a new injury to his damaged hip in a fall from a motorcycle. He was sent back to hospital in Nairobi, where the doctors examined an X-ray of his hips and declared him unfit for active duty.

In the aftermath, Campbell was employed, between September 1943 and April 1944, as a coast-watcher, looking out for enemy submarines on the Kenyan coast north of Mombasa. During this period, he spent several sojourns in hospital due to attacks of malaria. On 2 April 1944, he was discharged from the army as unfit owing to chronic osteoarthritis in his left hip. The intention was to transport him home to England, but due to an administrative error, he was sent by sea to South Africa. Early in June he set sail north again through the Suez Canal on the hospital ship Oranje, arriving in Liverpool towards the end of the month. After convalescing in a hospital in Stockport, Campbell rejoined his wife; since their house had been bombed, they lived for a time in Oxford with the Catholic writers Bernard and Barbara Wall.

On 5 October 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis disliked, "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism" and had attacked him in a poem titled "To the Author of Flowering Rifle." In the poem, Lewis had lampooned Campbell's "lack of charity" and called him a "loud fool" who had learnt the art of lying from his enemies on the left. Lewis had further declared,

--Who cares

Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?

During the evening, Lewis, feeling belligerent after consuming several glasses of port, insisted upon reading the poem aloud, while Campbell laughed off the provocation.

Tolkien, who was then hard at work writing The Lord of the Rings, was charmed by Campbell. In a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien compared Campbell to Trotter, a torture-crippled hobbit character who appeared in an early draft of The Lord of the Rings, to become the character of Aragorn in the final versions. Tolkien further commented,

Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona — in vain, they were caught & butchered, and R.C. nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the Red country. However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left - the 'corduroy panzers' who fled to America

According to Tolkien, Lewis' hostility to Campbell was grounded in residual Anti-Catholicism from his upbringing in Northern Ireland.

But hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C of E — so deep laid that it remains even when all the superstructure seems removed (C.S.L. for instance reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!). Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered — he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it).

In the aftermath, Campbell joined Tolkien and Lewis at several meetings of the Inklings at The Eagle and Child.