Frank Prewett

Who was Frank Prewett?

Frank James Prewett was a Canadian poet, who spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. He was a war poet of World War I, and was taken up by Siegfried Sassoon. After a period of being lionised socially he led a mainly unsatisfactory life, suffering from bad health.

He was born near Mount Forest, Ontario and brought up on a farm near Kenilworth, Ontario. He hinted that he had an Iroquois background on his mother's side; this was once accepted in his version, but has been questioned by later scholarship. In 1915 he left his studies at the University of Toronto and enlisted as a private soldier in the Canadian Army. Later he was offered and accepted a commission in the British Army, serving in the Royal Field Artillery. He served in France, but was invalided out of the armed forces in 1917. It was at Craiglockhart War Hospital that he met Sassoon, who paints a brief portrait of him in Siegfried's Journey, his autobiography. Sassoon introduced him to Lady Ottoline Morrell and he stayed at Garsington, her estate, while he awaited repatriation to Canada. While in Canada, Prewett maintained a regular correspondence with Lady Ottoline.