laurence binyon·1869 - 1943

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Robert Laurence Binyon was born at Lancaster on 10 August 1869. He was the second son of the Reverend Frederick Binyon, vicar of Burton-in-Lonsdale and was descended from Quaker stock on both sides of the family.

“It struck a chord with the British People like no other and for that reason its fourth verse appears on many British war memorials dating from that period”

As a child he demonstrated considerable talent both as an artist and poet. He was educated at St Paul's School and at Trinity College, Oxford. He took a first in Classical Moderations in 1890 and a second in Literae Humaniores in 1892. In 1893 he started work at the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum in Bloomsbury. In 1895 he was transferred to the Department of Prints and Drawings and promoted Assistant Keeper of that Department in 1909. In the period 1898-1907 he produced the four volume work Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists and Artists of Foreign Origin working in Great Britain preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum.

In 1912 a remarkable individual called at the Museum to see him. His visitor was the painfully shy poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg who made a deep impression and he would follow his career with interest for the rest of his short life. As some measure of his regard for his talent, ten years later Binyon would write the introduction to Gordon Bottomley's selected edition of his poetry. ‘During the war Binyon served with the Red Cross, visiting the front in 1916, but it was the British Museum that dominated his life. An expert on Japanese and Chinese art, he retained, as did so many of the war poets, a sensibility that was deeply rooted in the English landscape, a fact reflected in both his own verse and his critical work on Blake, Girtin, Cotman and Towne.'

Early in the Great War, whilst on holiday, Binyon produced his most famous poem entitled For the Fallen. It struck a chord with the British People like no other and for that reason its fourth verse appears on many British war memorials dating from that period. It is also carved into the right-hand pilaster of the main entrance to the British Museum. In the United Kingdom the fourth verse of this poem is the formula usually recited in an Act of Remembrance. On 14 September 2003 a memorial commemorating the poem was inaugurated by his grandson where Binyon composed it on the cliffs at Polzeath, Cornwall.

Binyon married Cicely Powell in 1904. Their marriage was blessed with three daughters and his son-in-law Basil Gray succeeded him as Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the Museum when he retired. Binyon was made a Companion of Honour in 1932 and retired in 1933. That same year he became an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College. He then translated Dante's Divina Commedia into the terza rima of the original and wrote a number of plays. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and became President of the English Association 1933-34. ‘Binyon lectured four times in the United States between 1912 and 1934, and in China and Japan in 1929. He enjoyed travel, especially in France and Italy; and in the first year of the war of 1939-45, at the age of seventy, he occupied for some months the Byron Chair of English Letters at Athens'. A prolific author, Binyon's output was clearly hampered by his duties at the Museum. He wrote prose, poetry and also knowledgeably on art. He edited Blake's Woodcuts (1902) and wrote Painting in the Far East (1908), The Art of Botticelli (1913), Drawings and Engravings (1922), The Followers of William Blake (1925), Engraved Designs (1926), Landscape in English Art and Poetry (1931), Collected Poems in two volumes (1931), English Water-Colours (1933), Brief Candles (1938), Art and Freedom (1939), The North Star and other poems (1941), The Burning of the Leaves (1944) and The Madness of Merlin (1947).

Binyon died at Reading on 10 March 1943. The 1901 pencil drawing of him by his friend and collaborator William Strang, his drypoint (1898) and engraving (1918) are all in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Sir William Rothenstein's lithograph of Binyon is in Bradford City Art Gallery and his pencil drawing of him is in Manchester City Art Gallery.