Biography
Teresa Hooley (1888–1973), known mostly for a war poem A War Film about World War I, was a pseudonym of Mrs. F. H. Butler. This much information is given in Modern Poetry 1922-1934 by Maurice Wollman; who adds some further biographical information that is hard to check. She was born in Risley, Derbyshire, and (accordingly to a letter from her sold at auction recently) she lived at Goldenbrook Farm in Risley at some point during her life. Teresa Mary Hooley's early life was spent at Risley Lodge, the home of her father Terah Hooley (d1927), a successful lace manufacturer who built Springfield Mill at Sandiacre, and her mother Mary (d1928), his second wife. She made her name before the Great War, writing poems in the Daily Mirror alongside Edith Sitwell - not an admirer of her work. During the war, she presumably had an interest in Spiritualism, since her poem "Christ of the Night' appeared in the Occult Review in December 1915, on p. 342. Her work was published in a number of collections in the 1920s and 1930s but has largely fallen out of fashion. She had two full brothers who survived childhood. Of these the younger, Basil Terah Hooley, born in 1893, was decorated in the Great War but died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Her much older half-brother was the financier Ernest Terah Hooley of Risley Hall with whom she maintained a civil if frosty relationship. Hooley married Frank H. Butler in May 1920 at Risley Church. They had a son but the marriage did not survive. In later life some found her a formidable presence.
This text is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
