Heritage Talk: The lost words of war poet Nowell Oxland with Zoe Gilbert

9th November 2026 6:00pm (Doors open at 5:30 pm)

Kirkgate Centre

Pick up any Great War poetry anthology and you’re likely to find Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon or Ruport Brooke. Look closer and you might find Robert Graves, Edward Thomas or John McCrae, of In Flanders Fields fame or perhaps rarely you might find a poem entitled Outward Bound/Farewell by Alston boy Nowell Oxland.

In 2017 Zoe Gilbert was curating an exhibition to commemorate a hundred years since the end of the Great War. She searched for Cumberland voices and discovered Nowell Oxland and his friend Noel Hodgson. Both northerners, Noel Hodgson was more well-known, as Nowell Oxland was private about his work and his one published poem was printed anonymously in The Times on 27 August 1915. He never lived to see his short moment of fame, as he died at Gallipoli eighteen days earlier and his work was sent in by his friend and mentor Amy Hawthorn. But where was the rest of his work and who was Amy? The paths to discover Nowell Oxland’s lost words and the story of the woman who saved them for posterity have wound around the country and across the sea.

Chasing the Phantom, the lost words of war poet Nowell Oxlandshares his unpublished poems and stories, with essays by Stephen Cooper and Zoe Gilbert on his and Amy's lives, places and friendship. Warmly praised by Robert Macfarlane and John Lewis-Stempel, it was a runner up for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2026.