Frederick William Harvey DCM (26 March 1888 – 13 February 1957), often known as Will Harvey, was an English poet, broadcaster and solicitor. His poetry became widely popular during and after World War I. Early life Harvey was born in 1888 in Hartpury, Gloucestershire, and grew up in Minsterworth. He was educated at the King's School, Gloucester, where he formed a close friendship with Ivor Gurney, and then at Rossall School. Gurney and Herbert Howells, another local composer, later set a number of his poems to music. He started on a legal career, which would always be somewhat tentative; and began to consider conversion to Roman Catholicism. World War I On 8 August 1914, four days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany, Harvey joined the 5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment as a private. Shortly afterwards, in November, he became a Roman Catholic. He was an adherent of the distributism movement, described as a "third way", in opposition to both socialism and capitalism; and he was influenced by the work of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. His battalion was posted to France in March 1915, where he was promoted to lance corporal and awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. His citation for the DCM reads: Harvey returned to England for officer training, but after being commissioned and returning to France he was captured on 17 August 1916 in the German front-line trench while carrying out a reconnaissance patrol. He spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps, including those at Gütersloh, Crefeld, Schwarmstedt, Holzminden, Bad Colberg, and Stralsund. Writing Soon after his arrival in France, Harvey began to contribute to a trench newspaper, the Fifth Gloucester Gazette. His first volume of poems, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, was published in September 1916, shortly after his capture. He began to write more intensively in captivity, and poems were sent back to England for publication: his second collection, Gloucestershire Friends, appeared in 1917. His time in the camps is held to be his most productive period of writing. On returning from a spell of solitary confinement at Holzminden after a failed escape attempt, he saw that a fellow prisoner had drawn a picture over his bed in chalk of ducks in a pool of water. This inspired his most celebrated poem (and the title poem of his third collection, published in 1919), "Ducks". Post-war life Harvey returned home