16 Facts About Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol, the second of six children and the eldest son of his parents, Barnett and Hacha Rosenberg, who were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Britain from Dvinsk.

Isaac Rosenberg attended St Paul's Primary School at Wellclose Square, St George in the East parish.

Isaac Rosenberg became interested in both poetry and visual art, and started to attend evening classes at Birkbeck College.

Isaac Rosenberg withdrew from his apprenticeship in January 1911, as he had managed to find the finances to attend the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London.

Isaac Rosenberg was taken up by Laurence Binyon and Edward Marsh, and began to write poetry seriously, but he suffered from ill-health.

Isaac Rosenberg published a pamphlet of ten poems, Night and Day, in 1912.

Isaac Rosenberg exhibited paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914.

Afraid that his chronic bronchitis would worsen, Isaac Rosenberg hoped to cure himself by relocating in 1914 to the warmer climate of South Africa, where his sister Mina lived in Cape Town.

However, feeling better and hoping to find employment as an artist in Britain, Isaac Rosenberg returned home in March 1915.

Isaac Rosenberg published a second collection of poems, Youth and then after being unable to find a permanent job enlisted in the British Army at the end of October 1915.

Isaac Rosenberg asked that half of his pay be sent to his mother.

Isaac Rosenberg was sent with his unit to serve on the Western Front in France, where he arrived on 3 June 1916.

In January 1917, Isaac Rosenberg reported being sick and his family and friends asked his superiors to remove him from the front lines; he was transferred to the Fortieth Division Works Battalion and started to deliver barbed wire to the trenches.

Isaac Rosenberg wrote his poem Dead Man's Dump during this period.

Isaac Rosenberg applied for a transfer to one of the all-Jewish battalions formed in Mesopotamia, but historians have been unable to trace his application.

Isaac Rosenberg was first buried in a mass grave, but in 1926 the unidentified remains of the six KORL soldiers were individually re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, Saint-Laurent-Blangy, Pas de Calais, France.