Sidney Keyes entered Tonbridge in 1935 as a boarder in Hill Side. His mother died when he was a baby and he was brought up in Dartford by his grandparents. He enjoyed his time at Tonbridge which he found a civilized and tolerant school. He proved to be a considerable scholar with a gift for writing English and History essays, and a real feeling for literature and the written word. His form master in the sixth form was Tom Staveley, himself a poet, who encouraged Keyes to write poetry and, by the time he left Tonbridge in 1940, he had written more than forty poems. Staveley wrote of Keyes: ‘he had that rare hallmark of poetic genius, his capacity to hit the ear and eye at once with the impact of a single image’. No games player, Keyes was selected to run for his house in the Cras, the school cross-country race, but supposedly stopped for several minutes trying to remember a line from ‘Paradise Lost’. He was also a school prae.

Keyes left Tonbridge in 1940 with many academic awards and a history scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford. At Oxford he edited the university newspaper ‘Cherwell’ and, with Michael Meyer, edited ‘Eight Oxford Poets’. He gained a first in part one of History and by the end of 1941 he had written enough poems to be able to publish his first collection ‘The Iron Laurel’. He left Oxford to join the army in April 1942 and was later that year commissioned in to the Royal West Kent Regiment.

He joined his battalion in the last stages of the North African campaign in March 1943. It was here in Tunisia that he was killed on 29 April 1943 while leading a patrol to reconnoitre the battalion’s front near Sidi Abdullah. He is buried in the military cemetery at Massicault, still not yet twenty-one years old.

A second posthumous collection of his poems, ‘The Cruel Solstice’, was published later in 1943 and won the coveted Hawthornden Prize. His output for someone of his age was prodigious and his collected poems were published in 1945, edited by Michael Meyer. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is regarded as the best of the Second World War poets.