Laurence Binyon

Born in Lancaster in 1869, Laurence Binyon was educated at St Paul's School in London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He went on to work for many years at the British Museum, building a career not only as a poet and dramatist but also as a respected scholar of prints, drawings, and Asian art.

Binyon wrote steadily across more than fifty years, publishing poems, plays, criticism, and books on art. He is most widely remembered for "For the Fallen" (1914), the war poem that gave the English-speaking world one of its most enduring lines of remembrance: "They shall grow not old." Alongside his literary work, he was an important early British interpreter of Far Eastern painting and helped broaden public appreciation of Chinese and Japanese art.

In his later years he continued to write and lecture, and his reputation rested on an unusual combination of lyric feeling and learned curiosity. That mix makes him memorable not just as a war poet, but as a writer whose imagination moved easily between history, beauty, and acts of public memory.