In late November, Dr David Gervais, of the Edward Thomas Fellowship and an Honorary Fellow of the English Department at Reading University, spoke to an audience

comprising girls, staff and visiting pupils and staff from North London Collegiate School, on the poetry of Edward Thomas. Gervais spoke on the relationship between Thomas’s poetry and that of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and Ivor Gurney.

He also placed Thomas in the broader context of Modernist poets including Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, as well as later Twentieth Century poets including Ted Hughes, who referred to Thomas as “the father of us all”.

The audience were very appreciative of Dr Gervais’s most varied and thought-provoking talk.