John Pudney

John Sleigh Pudney (19 January 1909 – 10 November 1977) was a British poet, journalist and author. He was known especially for his popular poetry written during the Second World War, but he also wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction. His broad-ranging non-fiction, often commissioned, served as his primary source of income. Early life and career John Pudney was born at Langley Marish, the only son of Henry William Pudney, a farmer and countryman, and Mabel Sleigh Pudney. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, where he first encountered W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Humphrey Spender. He left school in 1925 at the age of sixteen, and spent several years working as an estate agent and studying to become a surveyor. However, he began contributing articles to the News Chronicle at the same time and also wrote short stories and channelled his love of the countryside into verse. At the time, he was one of a group of young writers, including Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne; they gathered about the well-known bookshop at No 4, Parton Street, near London's Red Lion Square, run by David Archer. His first published collection of verse, Spring Encounter, came out in 1933 from Methuen and gained the attention of Lady Ottoline Morrell who became a patron. Pudney also wrote for The Listener, and worked as a producer at the BBC, where he produced the radio play Hadrian's Wall with text by Auden and music by Britten; it was broadcast from Newcastle on 25 November 1937. While at the BBC he also wrote one of the first plays for television, Edna's Fruit Hat, which was broadcast on 27 January 1939. His first novel, Jacobson's Ladder, describing literary and criminal life in 1930s Soho, appeared in 1938. War poetry It was the advent of the Second World War that enabled Pudney to find his subject, the effect that war has on the lives of ordinary people, and with it his audience. In 1940 he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force as an intelligence officer and as a member of the Air Ministry's Creative Writers Unit, a noncombatant role. It was while he was serving as squadron intelligence officer at RAF St Eval in Cornwall that he wrote one of the best-known poems of the war. For Johnny evoked popular fellow-feeling in the London of 1941. Written during an air raid, it was published first in the News Chronicle and (with Missing, another poem by Pudney) later featured significantly in the film The Way to the Stars.