Saint John  Posted on April 8, 2009   By T.R. Healy   “And if
bad luck should lay my strength Into the shallow grave, Remember
all the good you can”  - John Cornford  John Cornford, if he is
remembered, is remembered as a martyr of the Spanish Civil War.
He was the first Englishman to go to the battlefront, less than
a month after the war began, and one of the first to die in
combat. A poet and a revolutionary, imbued perhaps with “too
great a burning,” as his mother once observed, he was someone
who was determined to make a difference in the world however
steep the price.  The great-grandson of Charles Darwin, he was
born December 27, 1915 into a distinguished Cambridge family.
His father was a professor of Ancient History at the university,
his mother a prolific writer of Georgian poetry whose most
prominent practitioner was her close friend Rupert Brooke. Nine
months after Brooke perished in the First World War from blood
poisoning, Cornford was born, and in tribute to the famous poet,
he was christened Ru