Ewart Milne

Ewart Milne (25 May 1903 – 14 January 1987) was an Irish poet who described himself on various book jackets as "a sailor before the mast, ambulance driver and courier during the Spanish Civil War, a land worker and estate manager in England during and after World War 2" and also "an enthusiast for lost causes – national, political, social and merely human".

He was born in Dublin, of English and Welsh-Irish parents, and was educated at Christchurch Cathedral Grammar School. In 1920 he signed on as a seaman and worked on boats, off and on, until 1935. During the 30s too he began writing and had his first poems published in 1935.

The background to the Spanish Civil War contributed to his political awakening and he came to England to work as a voluntary administrator for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee in London, for whom he often acted as a medical courier. Milne has also described how he was once unwillingly involved in some arms deal while visiting Spain on their behalf.

Arthur Peacock, a British volunteer in the International Brigades wrote:

After SMA was wound up, Milne returned to Ireland but remained politically active in support of the campaign for the release of Frank Ryan, the leader of the Connolly Column of Irish volunteers on the Republican side, who had been captured and imprisoned in Spain. At one point Milne took part in a delegation to Westminster seeking Labour Party support for this. In August 1938 he was reported in The Worker's Republic as being one of the 12 member committee of the James Connolly Irish club in London.

During his time in England and Spain, Milne got to know the left-leaning poets who supported the Republican cause, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. In 1938 his first collection of poems, Forty North Fifty West, was published in Dublin, followed by two others in 1940 and 1941. Having taken a pro-British line in neutral Ireland, he was informed by Karl Petersen, the German press attache in Dublin, that he was on the Nazi death list. This decided him to help in the British war effort and he returned to England with the help of John Betjeman (then working at the British embassy in Ireland).

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