A lasting joy

1904 – 1972

>Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his clergyman father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Lewis initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing. Under the pen-name <a href=https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2471327A/Nicholas_Blake/>Nicholas Blake</a>, he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, *A Question of Proof*, in 1935. Lewis went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as num…