Max Plowman - Life To 1918

Life To 1918

He was born in Northumberland Park, Tottenham, in London. He left school at 16, and worked for a decade in his father's brick business. He became a journalist and poet. In 1914 he married Dorothy Lloyd Sulman.

From the beginning of the First World War Plowman felt morally opposed to the fighting - "insane and unmitigated filth" - but on Christmas Eve 1914 he reluctantly volunteered for enlistment in the Territorial Army 4th Field Ambulance. He later accepted a commission in an infantry regiment, and serving at Albert, close to the Somme on the Western Front, he suffered concussion from an exploding shell. Deemed to be affected by shell shock, he was sent home to convalesce at Bowhill Auxiliary, a branch of Craiglockhart, where he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers, although he did not meet either of Rivers' two most celebrated patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. While recovering, he produced a poetry collection, A Lap Full of Seed, and an anonymous pamphlet, The Right to Live, inveighing against the kind of society that made war inevitable. Having been granted a further month's home service in January 1918, he wrote to his battalion adjutant asking to be relieved of his commission on the grounds of religious conscientious objection to all war. He was arrested and tried by court martial for refusing to return to his unit; his trial was covered in the Labour Leader in April 1918. Having been dismissed from the Army, fortunately without punishment, he was served with notice of call-up as a conscript, but successfully applied to a Tribunal for exemption as a conscientious objector.

In July 1918 Plowman gave a positive review in the Labour Leader to Siegfried Sassoon's anti-war poetry collection Counter-Attack. It was in response to a request in a letter from Plowman that Sassoon campaigned for Philip Snowden in Blackburn, in the December 1918 General Election.

His memoir of the war A Subaltern on the Somme was published in 1928, under the pseudonym "Mark VII".