A Voice for the Men the Poem Couldn’t Feed

A Poetry Tale about Alfred, Lord Tennyson, told by Hello Doggo.

Here’s the trouble with being immortalised in a famous poem. It doesn’t pay the rent.

In eighteen ninety, thirty-six years after the Charge of the Light Brigade, word got out that some of its survivors were destitute. The Secretary for War said he couldn’t help. So a London paper, the Saint James’s Gazette, started a relief fund.

Enter Colonel George Gouraud, Thomas Edison’s man in Britain, with a phonograph and an idea. Famous voices. On wax.

First, Tennyson himself, reciting the poem that made those men immortal: “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.”

Then Florence Nightingale, at her house in Mayfair, speaking into the horn: “When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore.”

And finally a veteran trumpeter, Martin Lanfried of the Seventeenth Lancers, sounded the charge, on a bugle said to have been blown at Waterloo.

Now, Lanfried claimed he’d sounded the charge at Balaclava, too. So did other men. Who actually blew it, if anyone did, is still argued over.

The cylinders still survive. You can hear them, crackling, more than a century on.

Years before the Charge, Tennyson had written Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead, about a soldier carried home, and the grief that follows.

The country had wept for the dead. It had rather forgotten the living.