Universal themes – Brian Maye on poet and playwright Frederic Herbert Trench

Cork-born Frederic Herbert Trench, who died 100 years ago on June 11th, was a prolific poet and also a theatre manager, playwright and non-fiction author. However, he’s largely forgotten today in his native country, mainly because he spent most of his life outside of Ireland, considered himself more English than Irish and identified mainly with the English literary tradition, although he attended frequent poetry gatherings at London’s Irish Literary Society.

He was born in Avoncore, Midleton, on November 12th, 1865, the eldest son of William Wallace Trench, who was a wealthy farmer, and Elizabeth Allen. From 1880, he attended Haileybury public school in Hertford, England, co-editing Haileybury Verses there in 1882. He graduated from Keble College, Oxford, in 1888 with a first-class degree in modern history and was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the following year.

Working as a temporary and then senior examiner of the Board of Education from 1890 to 1908, he also travelled in Europe, northern Africa, Russia and Syria and collected various art forms. During that time, he published several books of poetry, his first and most significant being Deirdre Wed and Other Poems (1900). The title poem is based on the ancient Irish mythological tale from the Ulster Cycle (sometimes called the Red Branch Cycle), known as Oidheadh Clainne Uisnigh (the Tragic Deaths of the Sons of Uisneach), and tells of Deirdre falling in love with Naoise and eloping and fleeing with him and his brothers from King Conchobar Mac Nessa and his pursuing warriors.

Other poetry collections by him were New Poems (1907), Lyrics and Narrative Poems (1911), Poems with Fables in Prose (1918), Selected Poems (1924) and Collected Works (1924). Both of the latter were published posthumously, the Collected Works in three volumes, the first volume of which, facing the title page, had a photo of a bronze portrait bust of Trench by Italian sculptor Antonio Maraini.

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Many of the poems were set to music. In 1908, a Dramatic Symphony, Opus 51, written by English composer, conductor and pianist Joseph Holbrooke, taken from Trench’s poem Apollo and the Seaman, was performed under the renowned English conductor Thomas Beecham. Holbrooke also set the poem Killary to music (Five Songs, Opus 54: No. 1, Killary). Some of his other poems were set to music by English composer Arnold Bax and American composer and choral director Mildred Lund Tyson.

“Trench’s poetry is characteristically concerned with universal rather than personal themes. While it is not easy to identify the influences on his work, in later life he acknowledged Matthew Arnold as an inspirational force,” according to Jessica March, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. A few important Irish commentators (such as the poet Austin Clarke, who considered him to be neglected) have mentioned him but his poetry is mostly forgotten in Ireland for the reasons given at the beginning of this piece.

He was artistic director of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, from 1908 to 1911, where he collaborated with his friend Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, eighth Baron Howard de Walden. They put on, among other plays, The Blue Bird by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and Henrik Ibsen’s The Pretenders, as well as Shakespearean classics, such as King Lear.

A frequent visitor to Italy from the age of 19, he eventually decided to make it his home. He moved to Settignano, near Florence, where, in 1917, he helped to establish the British Institute, with the aim of improving understanding between Britain and Italy. He served as honorary vice-chairman of the institute. Among his later publications were From Italy in Time of War (1915), and La Bataille de la Marne, published posthumously in 1925.

His sole completed play was Napoleon, a verse play described as “a dramatised chronicle” by Jessica March, which was set mainly around Boulogne-sur-Mer on the French coast opposite England. The Incorporated Stage Society produced it in 1919 but it made little impact. An accident he suffered that same year (the details of which were not recorded) ended his writing career.

He had married Lilian Isabel Fox, daughter of Robert Fox from Falmouth, Cornwall, in July 1891, and they had two daughters and a son. His sudden death occurred, at the age of 57, while in hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer. He had poems included in five anthologies of first World War poetry. There is a 1910 portrait of him by Alvin Langdon Coburn in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and his papers are in the National Archives of the United Kingdom.