Ian Hume Townsend Mackenzie was born in 1898, the son of Boyce John Mackenzie and Susan T. Mackenzie, of Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He was educated at St Lawrence School, Ramsgate, from 1912 to 1914. Between December 1915 and July 1917 he was a cadet officer at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, from where he was posted as a second lieutenant with the Highland Light Infantry, although, due to ill health, was not passed medically fit for active service... overseas. He was stationed with the battalion H.Q. in Scotland, promoted temporary staff captain, and was later stationed at Ramsgate. On home service training new recruits, he was able to maintain and develop his interest in poetry writing, publishing single items in a number of journals and in 1917 a small collection by Chapman and Hall, ‘The Darkened Ways’. His close friend Alec Waugh, whom he met at Sandhurst, introduced him to his father Arthur, the firm’s managing director. In the autumn of 1918 Mackenzie contracted Spanish influenza and subsequently pneumonia. He died at a Cambridge hospital during the night of 11/12 November, following the Armistice, having written a brief note to his mother on the subject. A fuller collection of his poems, ‘Forgotten Places’, with an introduction by Arthur Waugh, was published by Chapman and Hall in 1919.

Not seeing active war service, he was uncomfortable being described as a ‘soldier poet’, and apart from a few poems written during his time at Sandhurst, his poetry was not narrowly concerned with military themes. His outlook was distinctly un-militaristic, even pacifist, and he was more concerned to develop his poetry along ‘modernist’ lines. He died before he could fully establish himself as a poet with the public.