Owen

Wilfred Owen, second lieutenant of the Manchester Regiment, was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in June 1917 with shell-shock after fourteen days under bombardment in a flooded cellar at Savy Wood near Saint-Quentin. He was twenty-four years old. He had not yet published a poem he would later wish to be known by. On the seventeenth of August 1917 he met Captain Siegfried Sassoon, the published war-poet, who had been sent to Craiglockhart for a different reason, namely his refusal to serve any longer in protest at the war. The four months they overlapped at Craiglockhart, during which Sassoon read Owen's drafts and pushed back, were the four months Owen learned what he was. He drafted Anthem for Doomed Youth in September with Sassoon's pencilled corrections in the margins; he wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in October and rewrote it in November after Sassoon told him the framing was too genteel. He went back to the front in August 1918, was awarded the Military Cross at Joncourt on the first of October, and was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors on the morning of the fourth of November 1918. The telegram reached his mother at Shrewsbury on the eleventh of November as the Armistice bells were ringing.

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On the first of January 1800, Robert Owen, twenty-eight years old, the Newtown-Montgomeryshire-born self-made Manchester cotton-manufacturer, took over the management of the New Lanark cotton mills on the upper Clyde in Lanarkshire, a complex of four water-powered mills employing about two thousand workers (about five hundred of them pauper-apprentice children of seven to twelve years old, brought up from the Glasgow and Edinburgh poor-houses on six-year indentures), which Owen had purchased the previous year from his father-in-law David Dale with two business partners. Over the next twenty-five years Owen ran New Lanark as a deliberate experiment in industrial paternalism: he reduced the day from fourteen hours to twelve and then to ten and a half; refused to employ children under ten; opened the world's first infant school in 1816 for the under-fives of the mill's workers; raised wages, built clean housing, opened a co-operative shop that sold goods at cost. The mills became the most-visited industrial site in early-nineteenth-century Europe (about twenty thousand visitors over the years, including the future Tsar Nicholas I, the Habsburg archdukes, and most of the Whig and Tory leadership of the British political class). Owen's A New View of Society (1813) and Report to the County of Lanark (1820) became the foundational texts of British co-operativism and utopian-socialist thought. He emigrated to America in 1825 to found the community of New Harmony in Indiana (which failed in 1827) and returned to Britain in 1829 to lead the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834. New Lanark is, since 2001, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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