Norman Cameron

Norman Cameron (1905–1953) was a Scottish poet, distantly related to Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay who, between the two world wars, associated on Majorca with Robert Graves and Laura Riding. Later, as a part-time Fitzrovian, he was a colleague of Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson, Len Lye, John Aldridge RA, Alan Hodge and many others. He worked as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (being responsible for one classic campaign, Horlicks for night starvation) and at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.

Born in Bombay, Cameron was the eldest of four children of a Presbyterian Minister (Chaplain of the Bombay Presidency) who died prematurely in 1913. Subsequently, he and his siblings returned with their mother to live in Edinburgh. For his education he went to Alton Burn Preparatory School in Nairn and Fettes College in Edinburgh, where, at only 11 years old, he was the youngest boy ever to be admitted to the main school. There he came under the influence of, and retained a friendship with, W.C. Sellar ( who would later write 1066 and all that).

He went on to Oriel College, Oxford, and his verse was published in Oxford Poetry from 1925 to 1928. Needing money during the Great Depression, he taught briefly in Nigeria, under the auspices of that Colonial Government's Education Department. Then he spent time working and travelling in Continental Europe. While in Germany, early in Hitler's reign, he saw an incident which shocked him all his life: starving inmates of a concentration camp being tormented by local inhabitants, who were throwing bread so that it landed only just beyond the captives' reach. As a result of this, he was utterly dismissive of all later German assertions that most people remained ignorant of what was happening within the worst of the camps.

...
Wikipedia