Rank: Major

Service Number: 137983

Regiment: Royal Artillery, 193 Battery, 61 Anti-Tank Regiment

Died: 26th June 1944

Age: 33 years old.

William was a noted World War Two War Poet known by the name of John Jarmain. His best known poems were "At a War Grave" and "El Alamein".

Born in 1911 in Hatch End, Pinner, Middlesex, William was the son of William Moss Jarmain and of Mary Jarmain (née Fletcher) of 'Fairfield' Wellington Road, Hatch End. They had married in the Spring of 1909. His father was a Civil Servant at the Inland Revenue's District Valuation Office in London. The family employed a cook and a housemaid at their home. William had a younger sister Janet Mary. By 1921 the family had moved to Alandale Station Road in Hatch End. William's father died in 1937.

He was educated at Shrewsbury School before going to Queen's College, Cambridge in 1929, to read mathematics. William and some other students got into trouble with the law on Bonfire night in 1930 when attending a Guy Fawkes bonfire rag in Cambridge. William threw a lighted squib and after a chase by police was arrested. Appearing in court he was fined ten shillings.

After he graduated in 1933, he married Evelyn Ethel Houghton in June 1934 in Westminster and moved to Somerset, living in Pilton, West Pennard and Street. In 1936 William and Evelyn had a son Mark and one other child. William taught Mathematics, English Literature and Italian at Millfield School in Street. He had another brush with the law in November 1938 when he was fined one pound for speeding and ten shillings for not having car insurance. William and Eve separated in 1938 and started divorce proceedings. Eve cited adultery on William's part and in October 1939 was granted a divorce and custody of the two children.

When the Second World War was declared in 1939, William enlisted as a reservist in the Royal Artillery to await training and a commission. He was eventually commissioned in July 1940. He served throughout the Second World War as a gunnery officer with the 51st Highland Division, part of the 61st Anti-Tank Regiment Royal Artillery, during their campaigns in North Africa and Sicily.

In the Spring of 1940 he married Beryl Susan Butler. They lived at 'Briarwood' in Broadstone, Dorset and in 1942 they had a daughter Janet Susan.

William was posted to Scotland where he trained until 1942. He then served in North Africa with 242 Battery from August 1942 until May 1943. He fought in various desert battles including at El Alamein, Tripoli and Enfidaville.

Promoted to Major, he commanded 193 Battery and trained in Algeria before the Sicily landings in July 1943. After fighting in Sicily, William returned to the UK in November 1943.

After further training, he took part in the D Day landings and was killed by a mortar bomb on the 26th June 1944 at St Honorine la Chardonnerette, a village in Normandy, He was buried in Ranville War Cemetery in Normandy.

William is also commemorated on the War Memorial in St. John the Baptist Church in Broadstone and on the War Memorial and Roll of Honour at Queen's College, Cambridge.

While serving in the British Army in World War II, he wrote some of his most famous poems, including "El Alamein" and "Sand." His published work includes 'Priddy Barrows', a novel published in 1944, and 'Poems', a collection of his poems published posthumously to critical acclaim in 1945.

However, one hundred and fifty original manuscripts were kept locked away in a bureau by his widow Beryl. The poems were always sent back in numbered airmail letters to his wife. The letters give a vivid account of his experience of the war. It includes accounts of his embarkation on the troopship at Liverpool Docks, the sea journey via Capetown to Suez in Egypt, the time spent in the Western Desert learning the desert ways and fighting and Sicily landings. William records everyday aspects of his life in the desert, from the routine in the training camps to the battlefields. Sand and flies, dust storms and blackouts are mentioned together with the stunning landscape and nature surrounding him which he admires. The letters also throw light on the effects of separation on family life and the difficulty communicating with his family in England.

They were only discovered by their daughter, Janet Coward, at the family home in Blandford after her mother's death. In 2013 his daughter donated these manuscripts and letters to Exeter University where they are kept in their Archives.

Below is William's poem 'El Alamein'

There are flowers now, they say, at Alamein;

Yes, flowers in the minefields now.

So those that come to view that vacant scene,

Where death remains and agony has been

Will find the lilies grow –

Flowers, and nothing that we know.

So they rang the bells for us and Alamein,

Bells which we could not hear:

And to those that heard the bells what could it mean,

That name of loss and pride, El Alamein?

– Not the murk and harm of war,

But their hope, their own warm prayer.

It will become a staid historic name,

That crazy sea of sand!

Like Troy or Agincourt its single fame

Will be the garland for our brow, our claim,

On us a fleck of glory to the end:

And there our dead will keep their holy ground.

But this is not the place that we recall,

The crowded desert crossed with foaming tracks,

The one blotched building, lacking half a wall,

The grey-faced men, sand powdered over all;

The tanks, the guns, the trucks,

The black, dark-smoking wrecks.

So be it: none but us has known that land:

El Alamein will still be only ours

And those ten days of chaos in the sand.

Others will come who cannot understand,

Will halt beside the rusty minefield wires

And find there – flowers.

(Sources: CWGC, Ancestry, Find My Past, University of Exeter, IWM, National Archives, Arts Council, 'Flowers in the Minefields' by James Crowden, Newspaper Archives, Queen's College Cambridge, Jisc)

(Bio: Woose)