Robert Bridges (1833-1930) is the only qualified medical practitioner ever to have been appointed Poet Laureate, a position he held from 1913 to his death. He was born in October 1844, in Walmer, on the coast of Kent, with its important castle dating back to the Tudor period. As an article about him from the British Medical Journal states, his links to Kent through his family were extensive, and were to last till the death of his father in 1853, and the remarriage of his mother:
` Robert Seymour Bridges was born at Walmer, Kent (“in a house with grounds overlooking the Channel” on 23 October 1844; he was the fourth son and eighth child in a family of nine. His antecedents had been “Kentish yeomen” (settled at Harbledown2) since the early 16th century. One ancestor was the Reverend John Bridges (or Brydges), who died in 1590, and was rector of Harbledown for 10 years from 1579. His father was John Thomas Bridges, of St Nicholas Court, Isle of Thanet, and his mother Harriet Elizabeth, the third daughter of the Reverend Sir Robert Affleck, Bt (who had succeeded to the baronetcy from his cousin in 1833), vicar of Silkstone, Yorkshire. Bridges lived his childhood years in his father’s house Roselands, Walmer; when in his 10th year, however, his father died (at the age of 47 years), and one year later, his mother married the Reverend Dr John Edward Nassau Molesworth2; she then moved to Rochdale, Lancashire (where her husband was vicar).’ (Guy Cook, ` The medical career of Robert Seymour Bridges, FRCP (1844–1930): physician and Poet Laureate’,British Journal of Medicine, 2002, https://pmj.bmj.com/content/78/923/549#article-bottom)
Roselands has long since been demolished and the area redeveloped, though the property has left its name in a street near the church of St Mary. Bridges attended Eton College, and then Corpus Christi, Oxford. Where he studied medicine. He was to practice as a doctor for most of his early career, training at St Bartholomew in London, and then being elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1900. It was, however, to the vocation of poet that he most aspired, producing his first collection in 1877,and then self-publishing a series of works till he took up writing full time.
Bridge’s greatest influence however was perhaps not so much through his own work (though that too, in works like `Testament of Beauty’ (1929) was admired and was influential in its time), but through his acquaintance at Oxford with Gerald Manley Hopkins, and his championing of Hopkins’s work. He was the main influence behind the publishing of the first collection of Hopkins’s poems, posthumously, in 1918. These proved to be some of the most influential works of the 20th century.
Bridge’s was a profound Christian, and that informed almost all his work. His other main influence today is through the continuing use of some of his translations and settings of hymns such as `Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.’ While his ashes were buried in the church of Yattenden, Berkshire, there is a memorial to him in St Nicholas-at-Wade on the north Kent coast, along with one to his son, who went on to be a Cabinet Secretary during the Second World War.