Sir – It was interesting to read of Christopher Gray’s meeting with two grandsons of Laurence Binyon (The Oxford Times, September 18). The poet does indeed deserve to be better known, although he has never been forgotten in his old college, Trinity.

The earliest surviving manuscript of Binyon’s best-loved poem For the Fallen is currently on display in the Trinity College Chapel. It forms part of a small exhibition that commemorates the 159 members of the College — British, Canadian, South African, American, German and Austrian — who fell in the First World War.

Binyon’s original lines, penned on a Cornish cliff top and published in The Times on September 21, 1914, are not known to survive. But, in 1916, he wrote out the seven stanzas for the wife of a friend, and after many decades in the Army Museum, this copy found its way into the Library of Binyon’s beloved college.

The four evocative lines “ They shall grow not old as we who are left grow old/Age shall not wither them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them” form the central, fourth stanza of the poem.

Observant readers will notice that the Trinity College manuscript contains one significant variation on the words of the published version.

Clare Hopkins, Archivist, Trinity College, Oxford