1 High Street, Lancaster

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iBase ID

234937

Reference identifier

NLA20120217029

Title

1 High Street, Lancaster

Place

Lancaster

Personal names

Laurence Binyon

General notes

Laurence Binyon was born here. An engraving in stone on the front of the house reads "Laurence Binyon, poet and scholar, 1869-1943, was born at no. 1 High Street on 10th August 1869"

Binyon is famous for a poem published in The Times on 21st September 1914, The Fallen, particularly the central quatrain which runs...." They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. /At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them."

"Binyon, (Robert) Laurence (1869-1943), poet and art historian, was born on 10 August 1869 at 1 High Street, Lancaster, the second of the nine children of Frederick Binyon (1838-1900), vicar of Burton in Lonsdale, Yorkshire, and his wife, Mary (1839-1919).........Both his father's and his mother's families were of Quaker ancestry. Binyon won a scholarship to St Paul's School, London, in 1881 and later to Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a first in classical moderations in 1890 and a second in literae humaniores in 1892. A published poet at sixteen, he won the Newdigate prize for poetry with Persephone in 1890 and the same year published Primavera: Poems by Four Authors with his cousin Stephen Phillips, Manmohan Ghose, and Arthur Cripps..... In September 1893 Binyon joined the staff of the British Museum, where he would spend his entire career."
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online.

[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31890, accessed 17 Feb 2012]

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