Letter from Rt. Hon. Lord Healey of Riddlesden CH MBE

The Oasis poets came together in Cairo during the Second World War, and a first selection of their wartime poetry was published in 1943. After the war, the Salamander Oasis Trust was set up to collect, edit and publish not only these original Cairo poems but other poetry written in the Middle East and other theatres of operations during the Second World War.

Over ten years some 17,000 poems were collected and, whether used or not in the series of anthologies which have subsequently been published, these have since been deposited in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum.

They constitute a unique record of wartime poetry. Unlike the better-known poems of the First World War, which were mainly written by officers serving on the Western Front, the Oasis poems were written by servicemen and women of all ranks on every battle front.
Further information on access to the Salamander Oasis Trust Archive can be obtained from the Department of Documents, while the Trust's website is located at: http://www.salamanderoasis.org/

The Salamander Oasis Trust
"When, in a poem of the First World War, Charles Hamilton spoke of 'millions of the mouthless dead' (whose 'pale battalions' he was soon to join), he spoke prophetically.  We have the published testimony of a few poets, like Owen, Sassoon and Sorley - most of them officers - but virtually none from the mouthless millions who lived and died on the Western Front.

Thanks to the Salamander Oasis Trust, no such silence seals the wake of the Second World War.  Long before its end, Victor Selwyn and the Oasis editors had appealed for poems from their fellow servicemen and women to produce the Oasis anthology, Cairo, 1942-3.  Post-war, setting up a Trust, they collected poems from desks and drawers, archives and libraries, throughout the UK and Commonwealth, assembling more than 17,000 poems written on active service from every phase and theatre of that war.  No such record exists for any war before or since.  The Trust donated the unique archive to London's Imperial War Museum; and its anthologies, notably Return to Oasis (1980), From Oasis into Italy (1983), Poems of the Second World War (1985), More Poems of the Second World War (1989) and The Voice of War (1995) do, indeed, give voice to men and women of every rank in the UK and Commonwealth, who served in that war.

The Salamander Oasis Trust has ensured that 'We will remember them'".

John Stallworthy, Professor of English Literature
Oxford, 2001