Mannock's poetry

[Chock]

As you might know, Edward Mannock was a keen wordsmith and orator, despite his having had a quite modest education. That was something which he made up for by being an avid reader. He composed quite a few entertaining poems for the amusement of fellow squadron members, and here's one that doesn't get seen too often. It is of course a parody of Lewis Carroll's wonderful 1870s nonsense verse, Jabberwocky from Alice Through the Looking Glass, and you can see that Mannock himself is quite clever at weaving pseudo literary portmanteaus from aircraft names, nicknames and even military parlance, much of which shows an excellent understanding of Carroll's literary cleverness. Being that Mannock was also apparently quite a decent violin player, I think his understanding of the musical meter of the Carroll's original comes across well too:



You can see the original Carroll version here, for comparison:

Jabberwocky

Al

[rainbase]

That's GREAT!

[Mad Mac]

This is another illustration that Mannock was such an interesting character. Its strange that he is almost forgotten (or at least seldom mentioned) in WW1aviation literature. In my opinion he is a much more interesting character than MvR with almost the same number of victories.

[Gregvan]

Hi There,

According to author (and Oral Historian of the IWM) Peter Hart, in his superb book Bloody April; Slaughter in the Skies Over Arras, pages 298-299, this poem was written by one of Mannock's squadron mates in 40 Sqdn: "One rather clever parody of Edward Lear's Jabberwocky written by Captain William Bond, was popular in the 40 Squadron mess. It was prompted by the success of a BE2e in shooting down an Albatros....(Hart then quotes the poem in full)...Lieutenant Edward Mannock obviously must have appreciated this 'nonsense; because a copy of Bond's parody remains attached to his diary deep in the bowels of the RAF Museum to this very day."

So, I'm not sure who's right. However, I love the poem....

[Chock]

Yup, I've heard that story too, and it may in fact be true. On the other hand, I think there's some circumstantial evidence which points to it being by Mannock: If you compare it to this other ditty written by Mannock (this one relating to John Tudhope shooting down Hans Waldhausen's Albatros), there is a bit of structural similarity, notably the use of parenthesis in the first section and the personal comment at the end:

There was a little Hun
Who ventured O'er the lines,
(A risky thing to do,
in these riskiest of times.)
Said the airman on his tail,
in a voice so sweet and calm,
'another thousand revs wouldn't do you any harm'.

The structural similarities could be mere coincidence of course, and one of them compares somewhat to the Lewis Carroll original, which does tend to explain that. And it could even be a case of Mannock simply mimicking the Jabberwocky parody's structure because he liked it, if the story of William Bond having written it is true. It would be interesting to find out who genuinely is the author, but unfortunately, we may never know that for sure. Another rather obvious problem with Peter Hart's version, which points to poor research, is that he says Jabberwocky was by Lear, which of course it wasn't, and itself a parody of Edward Lear's nonsense style, but not knowing who wrote Jabberwocky doesn't mean his claim is not correct however.

Al

[snj5]

Brilliant work, whoever the author!

[crankcase]

Originally Posted by snj5

Brilliant work, whoever the author!

I think we can all live with the realistic hypothesis that it was probably a squadron effort... I see the pilots sitting around in the mess trying to unwind and relieve the stress through light banter, song and word play, helped by a bit of alcohol!
marc