The Terrible Inevitability of the Past

Robert Quilter Gilson was at King Edward's School, Birmingham with J.R.R. Tolkien, part of his close-knit group of friends who called themselves the T.C.B.S. While Tolkien went to Oxford, Gilson went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1912 to read classics. When Britain entered The Great War in 1914, Gilson entered the Cambridge University Officer's Training Corps, and was shipped out to France with the Cambridgeshires in 1915. A reluctant but beloved officer, Gilson was also a prolific letter writer, to his school friends, his family and his sweetheart, Estelle King, and wrote nearly daily from the trenches. Gilson was killed by a shell while leading his men over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916. Friend and fellow officer Andrew Wright wrote to Gilson's father, "It was the final but not the first triumph over his sensitive nature - He alone is brave who goes to face everything with a full knowledge of [his own] cowardice." (Excerpted in Garth, Tolkien and the Great War.)

R.Q. Gilson (left) with J.R.R. Tolkien in 1910 or 1911 (image from www.johngarth.co.uk)

I've been researching Gilson for an exhibition I'm helping to prepare on Trinity and members of Trinity in WWI. I wanted to find someone to focus on who wrote letters from the trenches and could speak, not to a spirit of the age, but for himself, and found Gilson in the pages of John Garth's excellent biography Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth. I've been looking through Trinity's archives and other records for mentions of him and have found relatively little, but have had a few nice surprises, for example a drawing he did of the cloisters beneath the Wren Library appeared in Trinity Magazine in 1914 in a section called "Artwork by Undergraduates". The past few days I have been doing this kind of work; chasing leads and scouring records, feeling more like a historian than a librarian for the time being.

Today, as part of my research, I looked Gilson up in the college Admissions Book, mostly to find the name of his tutor, as I already had a fair amount of information about him from other sources. After silently cursing my predecessors for not having students fill in their details alphabetically by surname as I do at the beginning of each Michaelmas Term, I found his entry and was surprised by the emotion I felt on seeing Gilson's details in his own handwriting, his curling script leaning slightly to the left in that upright early 20th century hand. It was as if after the time spent chasing after scraps of evidence of his existence, I turned a corner to meet him face to face. I thought about all the young men and women who I see signing the latest incarnation of the Admissions Book each year and imagined Gilson (I admit, I call him Rob in my head) in the same situation, brimming with possibility and purpose, but in this case I know what lays in store for him, unguessed by any of his peers. He has four years left after writing his details in the regimented columns of this book.

Four years.

Most of what I know of him comes from John Garth's biography of Tolkien, but I have the impression of a generous friend, a kind, caring, eloquent young man with a talent for drawing and painting. He got so little chance to leave his mark, but he left one just the same. I've reached 1914 in the Cambridge Review searching for Rob's name, and behind the articles about donations of books for the Field Hospital in Nevile's Court, Trinity, a Royal visit to the Leys School and sudden anti-German sentiments there are the statistics, the falling undergraduate numbers and the growing lists of names. And each of those names was another Rob Gilson - perhaps not as eloquent or artistic, perhaps not so fiercely beloved - but a young man full of potential.

Lieutenant R.Q. Gilson of the 11th Battalion Suffolk Regiment (known as "the Cambridgeshires" - image from http://www.curme.co.uk/p.htm)

I do not want to argue that World War I was good or bad, or that nationalism is foolish. My own pacifist feelings are, after all, a legacy that this war, the Great War, gave to the modern world. It's as irresponsible to judge people in 1914 for going proudly to war as it is to judge people predating the germ theory of disease for not washing their hands. I have little patience for people who indulge in this kind of retrospective superiority. But I do mourn what these men might have been. I want people who see our exhibition to know of someone like Rob Gilson, to see the awful gap he left in the world when he died in a field near Albert, France in July, 1916.

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the Rings

If you want to read more about him, an article excerpting Rob Gilson's letters was written by John Garth and published in Tolkien Studies.