Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson
Captain, 10th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, killed in action 23 March 1918. 51st Brigade, 17th (Northern) Division.
Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson was born in 1889. He was the son of Rev. Theodore Cameron Wilson and Annie Fredeline Wilson, of The Vicarage, Little Eaton. He wrote for Punch and wrote poetry.Wilson enlisted in the Guards in August 1914 but was later attached to the 10th Sherwood Foresters.
On 21 March 1918 the Germans launched a major offensive which penetrated the British lines at many points. On the 22nd he rescued one of his men who was stranded on the barbed wire in no-man's land. The following day he was hit by an enemy bullet and killed. His body was not recovered, or not identified, and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial. He was 29.
Wilson's book of poems, 'Magpies in Picardy' (The Poetry Bookshop, 1919), did not sell well and it was not until Field Marshal Lord Wavell included some of Wilson's poetry in his own war time anthology that he received artistic recognition.
He once wrote, "War is indescribably disgusting."
Still
Still
though chaos
Works on the ancient plan;
Two things have changed not
Since first the world began.
The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.
T. P. Cameron Wilson