eight, which won the Wyfold cup at Henley in 1909, and boxing for the university.
Grenfell had always set his heart on a military career. In 1910 he obtained a commission, and joined the 1st (the Royal) Dragoons at Muttra; a year later, the regiment was transferred from India to South Africa. Shortly after the outbreak of the European War, Grenfell, with his regiment, returned to England, and early in October 1914 accompanied it to France. Within a few weeks his gallantry and soldierly abilities had won him a great reputation: ‘he set an example of light-hearted courage which is famous all through the army in France,’ wrote a distinguished officer in a contemporary letter, ‘and has stood out even among the most lion-hearted’. He was awarded the distinguished service order for a daring feat of individual reconnaissance in November 1914, and in January 1915 he was mentioned in dispatches. On 13 May 1915, near Ypres, he was wounded in the head, and on 26 May he died in hospital at Boulogne. He was buried in the military cemetery on the hills above Boulogne.
On the day his death was announced (27 May), a poem by Grenfell, Into Battle, appeared in The Times. It was at once recognized as one of the finest of the many fine poems inspired by the War. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of it, ‘I don’t think that any poem ever embodied soul so completely. . . . Those who glorified War had always, before this, been a little too romantic; and those who had a feeling for the reality of War had always been a little too prosaic. It can’t be done again.’ The poet laureate, Mr. Robert Bridges, included it in his anthology, The Spirit of Man (1916). The few other poems which Grenfell left, such as, To a Black Greyhound, Hymn to the Fighting Boar, and The Hills, are in a lighter vein, but all show the same power of expressing poetically his intense love of nature, his vivid delight in life, and light, and energy.
Apart from his poetry and his great military promise, Grenfell’s short life is memorable for the deep impression which he made on his contemporaries of all ages. Old and young saw in him the personification of triumphant Youth. This impression is finely conveyed in a sonnet to his memory by Mr. Maurice Baring, while in a family history compiled by his mother, and privately circulated under the title Pages from a Family Journal, there survive not only a series of tributes to him from many pens, but also a delightful collection of his own letters.
Of his two brothers, the elder, Gerald William (born 1890), a scholar of Balliol from 1909 to 1913, who won a Craven scholarship in 1911 and obtained his ‘blue’ for tennis, was killed in action in July 1915, and the younger, too, died from the results of a motor accident in 1926.
[E. B. Osborn, The Muse in Arms, 1917; R. Bridges, The Spirit of Man; Maurice Baring, Poems, 1926; The Balliol College War Memorial Book, 1924.]
GREY, ALBERT HENRY GEORGE, fourth Earl Grey (1851–1917), statesman, was born 28 November 1851, the younger but only surviving son of General the Hon. Charles Grey [q.v.], second son of Charles, second Earl Grey [q.v.], the prime minister. His mother was Caroline Eliza, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Harvie Farquhar, second baronet, of Cadogan House, Middlesex. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, passing out first in the old law and history tripos in 1873. From 1880 to 1885 he was member of parliament for South Northumberland, a constituency for which he had stood unsuccessfully in 1878. From 1885 to 1886 he sat for the Tyneside division of that county. Although nominally attached to the liberal party he took up from the first a somewhat independent position, being especially interested in subjects such as proportional representation and the reform of the national church. He was one of the dissentient liberals who voted against the Home Rule Bill of 1886, but he was defeated when he stood as a liberal unionist at the ensuing general election. No one was more catholic in his interests. Agriculturist, traveller, and sportsman, he was also a social reformer and a champion of unpopular causes; so that there seemed some risk lest his energies, diverted into such varied channels, might run to waste. Fortunately, however, they became mainly concentrated upon one object, the promotion of imperial unity.
In 1884 Henry George, third Earl Grey [q.v.], had transferred the entire management of his estates to Albert, who made the family seat at Howick, Northumberland, his head-quarters, although he did not succeed his uncle until 1894. During this period he made friends with William Thomas Stead [q.v.] who was then editing the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead introduce him to Cecil Rhodes, who in later years impressed him the most of any man that he had known.
At the time of the granting of the charter to the British South Africa Company (29 October 1889) Grey was invited
227
