John Oxenham

Biography

Manchester, 1852: the cotton smoke still hung in the air when William Arthur Dunkerley first drew breath. By the time he swapped that cumbersome name for the pen-name “John Oxenham” he had already circled the Atlantic as a restless young publisher, launching the breezy monthly *The Idler* and later the snappy weekly *To-Day*. Train whistles, dockside gulls and the clatter of composing rooms soundtracked his twenties and thirties, but the itch to create rather than merely print finally overtook him. 1913: a quiet book of aphoristic verse called *Bees in Amber* slipped from his study. His cautious publisher, certain it would bomb, begged him to cap the print-run at two hundred. Oxenham paid the printer himself. Within months the little honey-coloured volume was everywhere—parlour tables, trench knapsacks, ocean-liner lounges—selling close to 300 000 copies. War soon followed, and with it his self-issued wartime poems: slim volumes posted out by the sack-load, their pages passed hand to muddy hand until the total passed a million. From the same study came a four-page song-sheet, “Hymn for the Men at the Front”; by Armistice it had chimed its way to eight million copies, a quiet chorus rising from every front-line trench and home-front hearth. In between, and long after, Oxenham poured out more than forty works—novels that roamed from Cornish coves to Canadian prairies, essays that argued and soothed, poems that distilled whole decades into a handful of ringing lines. He closed his final notebook on 23 January 1941, in Worthing, the Sussex sea glittering beyond his window.