RIFLEMAN ERNEST FREDERICK WALDEN
LONDON REGIMENT
1ST OCTOBER 1918 AGE 19
BURIED: CAMBRAI EAST MILITARY CEMETERY, FRANCE
It was John Milton (1608-1674) who first wrote about clouds and silver linings with the implication that even in the darkest night of sorrow there can be a glimmer of hope.
Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err: there does a silver cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
Comus 1634
The American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) took up the idea rather more bracingly:
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
The Rainy Day 1842
W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) used the saying in The Mikado (1885): Yum-Yum weeping as she remembers that her bridegroom is to be beheaded in a month is told by him: "Don't let's be downhearted! There's a silver lining to every cloud".
It wasn't weather clouds but smoke clouds that had silver linings in a set of WW1 Bamforth postcards - cigarette smoke clouds. The three cards each carry a verse of what might loosely be called a poem with an image of a dreamily smoking soldier who is urged to "only gaze at the smoke clouds and never despair, for there's bound to be some silver lining somewhere".
It was probably, however, the chorus from the popular patriotic song, Keep the Home Fires Burning (1914) by Ivor Novello (1893-1951) that gave the phrase its biggest circulation:
Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning.
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
'Til the boys come home.
Ernest Walden enlisted before he was conscripted and was killed in action five weeks before the end of the war. A profile of the family has been prepared by Margaretha Pollitt Brown for Wanstead United Reform Church.