contributors: Anon., Sir George Arthur, Maurice Baring, Max Beerbohm [and 36 others] Decorated by Rex Whistler Whistler was a prominant artist, who was killed in Normandy in WW2

Diary for 1930-31. 8vo., pp. xii, 143, 4 col. plates, head pieces and cover design by Whistler, paper boards, cloth spine.

(Contributors include Lord Berners, Vita Sackville-West, Siegfried Sassoon, Max Beerbohm, Clive Bell, Christopher Sykes, Cyril Connolly &c.)


each season bears a Rex Whistler colour illustrated panel, and various b and w sketches throughout. The dates are interspersed with witticisms, poems and reflections from many of the literary favourites of the period, Max Beerbohm, Vita Sackville-West, Hillaire Belloc, JC Squire, Cyril Connoly, Hugh Walpole etc et

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When war broke out, though he was 35, he was eager to join the army. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards as Lieutenant 131651. His artistic talent, far from being a stumbling block to his military career, was greatly appreciated and he was able to find time to continue some of his work, including a notable self portrait in uniform now in the National Army Museum. In 1944 he was sent to France following the D-Day Landings. In July he was with the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion in Normandy as the invasion force was poised to break out of the salient east of Caen. On the hot and stuffy 18th July his tank, after crossing a railway line, drove over some felled telegraph wires beside the railway, which became entangled in its tracks. He and the crew got out to free the tank from the wire when a German machine gunner opened fire on them, preventing them from getting back into their tank. Whistler dashed across an open space of 60 yards to instruct its commander, a Sergeant Lewis Sherlock, to return the fire. As he climbed down from Sherlock's tank a mortar bomb exploded beside him and killed him instantly, throwing him into the air. He was the first fatality suffered by the Battalion in the Normandy Campaign. The two free tanks of his troop carried out their dead commander's orders before returning to lay out his corpse beside a nearby hedge, after first having removed his personal belongings. Whistler's neck had been broken, but there was not a mark on his body. The troop was then immediately called away to act as infantry support, so when that evening Sherlock obtained permission to locate and bury Rex Whistler, he found that this had already been done by an officer of the Green Jackets, a regiment in which Whistler's younger brother, Laurence (an acclaimed glass engraver and poet) was serving.