Over the winter of 1914/15 there was in The Times letters page a correspondence concerning the origin of the phrase ‘gone west’. The question ‘Does any one know the origin or meaning of the soldiers' curious phrase for death, ‘Going West’?’, posed on New Year’s Eve, firmly placed the phrase as one that was associated with, and possibly originated by, soldiers, the association continuing at the beginning of Israel Gollancz’s answer, published on 8 January. Gollancz, at the time Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College London, and a Shakespeare scholar, quoted in his letter lines from a poem from the time of Chaucer:
Women and mony wilsome wy
As wynd and wattir ar gone west
(Women and many a good man
Like wind and water are gone west)
Gollancz’s letter leads down a path linking going west to travelling clockwise and its association with luck, as opposed to travelling widdershins; but more usefully mentions the wide association with the setting sun. But there are also regional origins supposed – including the idea of the condemned felon’s trip from London’s Newgate Prison westwards to the gallows at Tyburn. While the poem is identified as either originating in the West Midlands, or heavily influenced by the dialect of that area, Gollancz also questions whether the phrase was being used more by soldiers from particular areas of the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland or the West of England – noting that a previous correspondent had heard the phrase used by soldiers from Munster, the south-west of Ireland. All of these areas may be seen as having Celtic cultural influences (though what this actually means is difficult to determine), which links to the current definition of ‘gone west’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The sense became widespread during the First World War (1914–18). The relationship between quot. a1532[the poem quoted by Gollancz] and the later evidence has not been firmly established. Apparently ultimately with reference to the west as the place of the setting sun and perhaps also to its identification (esp. in Celtic traditions) as the abode of the dead.
The idea of a connection between death and the setting sun continued to be referred to by people fascinated by the phrase during the war, bringing references to other potential sources: the ‘Miscellany’ writer for the Manchester Guardian 25 September 1917 wrote that he had discovered the Chinese phrase hui-hsi, meaning ‘returned west’, or ‘gone to heaven’. The connection seems so natural that it perhaps needs to be pointed out that it is not universal; when Homer’s Odysseus decides to visit the land of the dead he is driven by a wind taking him southwards; and current American slang proposes ideas and processes that fail as having ‘gone south’.
Equally though it is worth wondering why its colloquial use early in the First World War had such a strong take-up. It is notable that the phrase does not appear in Farmer and Henley’s 1905 edition of A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial Usage; Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937) dates its popularization to the First World War, but notes the general idea appearing centuries earlier in English with the reference to the journey to Tyburn. Partridge believed this to be ‘the operative origin of the phrase’ but extended the referential field widely, noting associations he described as romantic, that connected the setting sun to the end of life, quoting a Greek proverb that translates as ‘life draws towards its evening, the west, the setting sun’. Partridge's trajectory of the phrase through five centuries cemented the link to death, from the 15th century to the 16th (‘55 women … are gone west’ [sadly with no reference but possibly a reference to religious or superstitious persecutions]), through the penal irony of the 17th and 18th, to a revival in America in the 19th with associations of the failure of many pioneering adventures; and finally to the cynicism of the trenches in Flanders. It must be said that Partridge ends this chapter of Words! Words! Words! (1933) with uncharacteristic emotion – ‘too many of our friends and our people meet their death like a gallant sun dipping over the western horizon that a better day might be born’. Perhaps the present tense use of ‘meet’ indicates the ongoing nature of the mental experience, but it is rather different in tone from the soldiers’ related terms offered on the same page – ‘pushing up the daisies’ and ‘copping a packet’.
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