Charles William Dalmon (1862–1938)Births Index Jun 1862 Steyning 2b 233, Deaths Index Mar 1938 Finsbury 1b 567 aged 76. was a British poet, 1890s decadent, 1920s film designer,Work with Lucky Cat Films in the early 1920s.. Credits for art direction for a 1928 film The Blue Peter. and friend of Noël Coward.Dalmon is supposed to have uttered the outrageous my ambition is to be crushed to death between the thighs of a guardsman..
Life Dalmon was a contributor to The Yellow Book, and was published in The Living Age, in the mid-1890s. His poems subsequently appeared in many anthologies,Including his Camelot in the 1929 John Drinkwater Twentieth-Century Poetry. but his reputation was never bright.A review in The Daily Telegraph > (25 June 2006) noted that John Betjeman was a fan, classing Dalmon with "dim and half-forgotten poets" such as Theodore Wratislaw, William Renton and Edmund John. Jean Moorcroft WilsonIn her Siegfried Sassoon, volume II (1918-1967) from 2003, p.257. notes that Siegfried Sassoon and Ralph Hodgson planned to publish "small, neglected authors", into which group Dalmon fell with Thomas Ashe and Primovard Dugard.
There are ascriptions to Dalmon of Manx songs and ballads, which may be collector's or editor's rather than author's credits. O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken? is given as by him,Index to 'Manx National Songs' by W.H.Gill at www.isle-of-man.com but there is a related old ballad.Broadside ballads entitled 'The Blackbird' and 'My Name is Duncan Campbell' at www.nls.uk The (Red) Fuchsia Tree, set by Roger Quilter at www.btinternet.com and John Raynor,British Composers: 20th century English composer John Raynor at www.kcedensor.freeserve.co.uk is attributed to Dalmon but may be traditional.See the Preface to the 1896 collection of arrangements Manx National Songs, by W. H. Gill, for the context.
In December 1934, Charles Dalmon 'Sussex poet' and 'descendant of Tudor Court Favourite' joined the British Union of Fascists.The Blackshirt, 7 December 1934, p.10
Works Minutiae (1892) Song Favours (1895) Flower And Leaf (1900) A Poor Man's Riches (1922) Singing As I Go (1927) The Last Service (1928)
External links
Archive Material at Leeds University Library
Notes