Norman Cameron

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J. Norman Cameron (1905 – 1953) was a Scottish poet, who associated on Majorca with Robert Graves and Laura Riding; and later as a Fitzrovian with Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson, Len Lye and many others. He worked as an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (being responsible for one classic campaign, Horlicks for night starvation) and at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, his total poetic output amounted to about 70 poems. He translated works by François Villon, Balzac, Rimbaud and Hitlers Table Talk 1941-1944 (Trevor Roper).

Born in Bombay the eldest of four and following the death of his father ( a Presbyterian Church minister) in 1913, he and his siblings returned with their mother to Scotland to live in Edinburgh. He was educated at prep school ( Alton Burn) in Nairn, then at Fettes in Edinburgh (at 11, the youngest boy ever to be admitted to the main school, where he came under the influence of, and retained a friendship with W.C. Sellar ) and at Oriel College, Oxford. His verse was published in Oxford Poetry from 1925 to 1928.

For a period he worked for the Education Dept in Nigeria and spent time travelling on the European continent, in Germany particularly - where he witnessed the starving inmates of a concentration camp being teased by the local inhabitants ( bread being thrown so it remained just out of reach), out for a Sunday excursion - post war denials thus cut no ice with him. During the war he worked in London in Broadcasting House for the Political Intelligence Department using his fluency in German; in the North African Campaign he continued in the same shadowy organisation, where he wrote scripts for a series called 'Kurt and Willy', designed to be listened to by Rommel's Afrika Korps,. He was awarded an MBE for this work. At the war's end he worked in the British Zone of Austria (then under 4 Power Military Occupation) in the British Delegation of the Allied Commission for Austria in Vienna restarting the newspapers, where he met his Austrian 4th wife (journalist Dr Gretl Bajardi) .

He was, it is now often said, a poetic disciple of Laura Riding, from whom he later separated himself, & mostly self-taught, though influenced by his friend Robert Graves - Dylan Thomas said Norman was his best friend. He died at home in London of a brain haemorrhage, about six months before Dylan.

[edit] Works

The Winter House (1935)
Work in Hand (1942) with Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, Hogarth Press
Forgive Me, Sire (1950)
Collected Poems 1905-1953 (1957) Hogarth Press
Norman Cameron: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (1990) edited by Warren Hope and Jonathan Barker (published by Anvil Press Poetry ISBN 0 856 202 07