Geoffrey Dearmer

Who was Geoffrey Dearmer?

Geoffrey Dearmer LVO was a British poet. He was the son of Anglican liturgist and hymnologist Percy Dearmer.

During World War I, Dearmer was commissioned and served with the London Regiment at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Many of his poems dealt with the overall brutality of war and violence, to which he was a direct eyewitness. His brother Christopher, a pilot with RNAS, died of wounds in 1915, and his mother Mabel died the same year while serving with an ambulance unit in Serbia.

One of his most famous poems is "The Turkish Trench Dog".

He was appointed a Lieutenant in the Royal Victorian Order.

Dearmer died at the age of 103. The Geoffrey Dearmer Award for new poets was founded in his memory in 1997.