After 30 years in the police force, retired DS Terry Abrahams has developed a sixth sense for recognising faces. It’s a talent that led him to spot, in a piece of first world war film footage, one of Britain’s greatest poets during active service.
The Imperial War Museum is now investigating the footage which, if verified, would give a unique insight into war poet Isaac Rosenberg. Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a leading scholar of war poets and Rosenberg’s biographer, told the Observer this would be a “very significant” discovery – the only known moving image of a war poet in the trenches.
Rosenberg – known for his “trench poems”, written between 1916 and 1918 – was 27 when he was killed on the western front near Arras on 1 April, 1918. The footage shows a man in the right foreground, staring out at the camera with a haunted look. He wears an armband bearing the initials SB, for stretcher bearer. Behind him men tend to the wounded. The date and location have not yet been identified.
A lover of poetry, Abrahams was watching the ITV documentary The People’s War when he instantly recognised the ghostly figure in an archive sequence as Rosenberg. “That’s him!” he exclaimed to his wife. He showed the evidence – footage and photographs – to other police experts, who agreed with his identification.
Rosenberg is known to have served as a stretcher bearer, writing some of his most poignant lines from the horrors that he witnessed. In Dead Man’s Dump, he wrote of “A man’s brains splattered on/ A stretcher-bearer’s face;/ His shook shoulders slipped their load,/ But when they bent to look again/ The drowning soul was sunk too deep/ For human tenderness.”
The son of Lithuanian immigrants, Rosenberg grew up in London’s East End. He trained to be a painter, winning prizes at the Slade School of Fine Art. He enlisted in the British army in 1915, a reluctant soldier, writing in a letter that “nothing can justify war”, but “we must all fight to get the trouble over”.
His poetry exudes compassion and depth and is clearly written from first-hand experience. Moorcroft Wilson said: “While other people were giving the orders, he was actually doing the thing.” In Rosenberg’s biography, she writes that in Dead Man’s Dump “the reader views the scene first through the eyes of ‘someone carrying wire up the line on limbers and running over dead bodies’”.
The few surviving photographs of Rosenberg and his own accomplished self-portraits provide further evidence, showing a distinctly elongated face and a prominent straight nose.
Last week, Moorcroft Wilson viewed the footage at the Imperial War Museum in south London. “It could definitely be Rosenberg,” she said. Dr Toby Haggith, the IWM’s senior curator, said “it could be him”, but suggested that more research was needed to be sure of the unit, location and date.
Other experts consulted included Professor Caroline Wilkinson, a specialist in craniofacial identification who reconstructed Richard III’s head from the skull found in Leicester last year.
Clive Bettington, chairman of the Jewish East End Celebration Society, which is planning to erect a Rosenberg statue in London, is convinced that the film shows Rosenberg. He described the figure as among the most haunting from the war – “someone who’s utterly dejected, who’s been picking up bodies all day and who hates every minute of being there”.
