Steel City’s wartime poet

THE WAR poet John William “Will” Streets, who hailed from Whitwell, south of Sheffield, had been a miner at 14 and was dead at 30.

He said of his poems, in a letter to a publisher: “They were inspired while I was in the trenches, where I have had little time to polish them. I have tried to picture some thoughts that pass through a man’s brain when he dies. I may not see the end of the poems, but I hope to live to do so. We soldiers have our views of life to express, though the boom of death is in our ears. We try to convey something of what we feel in this great conflict to those who think of us, and sometimes, alas, mourn our loss.”

Streets was last seen alive as he went to the aid of a fallen comrade.