War Poets and Craiglockhart Hospital

Craiglockhart Hydropathic - a health spa - in Edinburgh was an officers’ hospital in World War I. Here soldiers who had suffered shell-shock, or neurasthenia, on the Western Front came to convalesce.

‘Talking therapies’ were developed by the pioneering psychiatrist and psychoanalyst William Rivers (1864-1922), whose job was to get his patients well enough to return to the front. Among many others, a whole cohort of war poets passed through his hands: Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Today we would call their condition ‘post-traumatic stress syndrome’.

There were several famous Scottish war poets and writers. Perhaps the best known poem of Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915), son of an Aberdeen professor, was ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’; it was found among his personal effects after he was killed by a sniper’s bullet.

In a bestselling novel of trenches life, ‘Ian Hay’ (John Hay Beith, 1876-1952) painted a more upbeat, ‘sanitised’ war picture in ‘The First Hundred Thousand’ (1915). 

Joseph Lee (1876-1949) was a journalist from Dundee serving in the Black Watch after 1914. His ‘Ballads of Battle’ (1916) and ‘Workaday Warriors’ (1917) were published while he was at the front. 

The author of the famous poem ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow’, recited around the world on Remembrance Day, was John McCrae (1872-1918),a Scots Canadian doctor who served in a military field hospital.

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