Election Fever

The present UK government is not the first coalition to have run the country, nor is it the first time that Conservatives and Liberals have been in alliance.  The 1922 general election was the British public’s opportunity to pronounce the verdict on the coalition government led by David Lloyd George, the “Welsh Wizard” (ironically born in Manchester), which had seen Britain through most of the war.

It was the second general election in which British women were able to vote (the first having been in December 1918) but suffrage was still far from universal.  Even men had not all been given the vote until the end of the First World War.  Not until 1928 would women be allowed to vote on the same terms as men.

The Liberals were divided, however, between those who supported the coalition government - the so-called "National Liberals", led by Lloyd George, and those who did not, led by Herbert Asquith.  Even put together, they did not secure enough seats in the election to rival either the Conservatives or Labour (at that time led by J R Clynes, a former mill worker who helped the party almost treble its number of seats in Parliament).

Minority parties that won seats included the Scottish Prohibition Party (in Dundee), and the Communist Party, who won two seats.  The new MP for Motherwell was Walton Newbold, a Lancashire pacifist who had previously stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate.    His party colleague who won the seat at Battersea North was Shapurji Saklatvala, the third ethnic Indian to be elected to the British Parliament.  Other new MPs elected included such famous names as Clement Attlee (also a minor war poet), Sidney Webb and Manny Shinwell.

One prospective Labour candidate who ended up not running in the election was Siegfried Sassoon’s friend and mentor, W H R Rivers, who had agreed to stand because “the times are so ominous, the outlook for our own country and the world so black, that if others think I can be of service in political life, I cannot refuse”.  In June 1922, Rivers died suddenly of a strangulated hernia, a loss that bowled Sassoon over.   To say he was in despair would be inaccurate, as he wrote of his eternal gratitude to Rivers, describing his late hero's "glory of selfless wisdom and human service".

Sassoon liked to think of himself as a Socialist and had, under Rivers' influence, briefly considered a parliamentary career of his own.  Without Rivers to guide him, any such thoughts vanished. Rivers was replaced as Labour candidate for the University of London by none other than H G Wells, who, despite his fame (he had been nominated for Nobel Prize in the previous year), was unable to break the Conservatives’ hold on the seat and finished third behind the Liberals.  

What did Rivers mean about the outlook being black?  The British Empire was at its zenith, governing one in four of the world’s population, but there were many concerns about the situation in Ireland, where the Irish Free State was in the process of being established; the Irish held their own general election the same month that Rivers died.  Unionism was the political refuge of many who were anxious about what this meant (times have not changed all that much, it seems).  In London, less than three weeks after Rivers’ death, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, a veteran of several wars and a prominent opponent of the settlement, was assassinated by the IRA at his home in Belgravia.  Lloyd George’s government had been unstable for some time.

Perhaps the main reason for Rivers' comment was the industrial unrest which had gone on throughout the previous year and which had caused Sassoon to make his trip to Merthyr to cover the miners' strike; his sympathies were entirely with the working classes.  The situation would not get much better in the coming years, and would culminate in the General Strike of 1926.   

The split between the Conservatives and Liberals had been largely brought about by a speech made by Conservative leader, Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law; this was what had forced Lloyd George's resignation.  Tragically, 65-year-old Law was diagnosed with throat cancer and forced to resign as Prime Minister early in 1923.  He died less than a year after the general election.

Lawrence wrote to commiserate with one unsuccessful candidate, a man also known to Sassoon – Winston Churchill.  Churchill, who had been MP for Dundee since 1908, was taken ill with appendicitis during the election campaign, and lost his seat to the Prohibitionist MP Edwin Scrymgeour, a local man who had opposed Churchill at every election and would remain a Dundee MP for nine years.  Churchill was without a seat in Parliament until 1924, but subsequently re-joined the Conservatives, saying, with characteristic wit, "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat".

Madame Suggia and her Cello

I was reading an article about Northumberland recently.  It's a region of Britain I particularly love (if you haven't been there yet, do), and one of the best places to visit is Lindisfarne.  It's not just for the ancient Celtic monastery - though of course that is of interest.  It's not even for the seabirds or the white sand beaches or the fresh crab sandwiches.

No, my favourite thing is the castle.  It's a dinky little thing on the top of a rock, although as you walk along the foreshore towards it, it looks enormous.  From 1901 until 1921, it was the home of the publisher Edward Hudson, who employed none other than Sir Edwin Lutyens (later to be the architect of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Thiepval memorial in France, and many other war cemeteries and memorials) to refurbish what had originally been a 16th century fortification.  The result was a pleasant country house.  Hudson even got Gertrude Jekyll to create a walled garden nearby.

It was thus that Siegfried Sassoon found it when he visited the castle in September 1918, in the company of his Canadian friend and fellow poet, Frank "Toronto" Prewett.  Their purpose was to visit the publisher William Heinemann, who had been staying with Hudson and had invited them to call while they were in the area; Sassoon at the time was based at Lennel House, Coldstream, on the Scottish borders, where he was convalescing from the wound that had put him out of the war.  (This was where he was staying when he received his last letter from Wilfred Owen.)

On arrival at Lindisfarne Castle, they found that Heinemann and Hudson were both absent, having been forced to return to London on business, and the only person there to greet them was the famous cellist, Madame Suggia.  It seems to have been the first time they had met in person, though Sassoon, being a music lover and regular concert-goer, was quite familiar with her reputation.

Guilhermina Suggia, born in Portugal in 1885 and thus almost the same age as Sassoon, was already internationally known.  She had recently broken with her partner, another equally famous cellist, Pablo Casals.  She found Britain a welcoming place where she was not being constantly compared with Casals in terms of her talent.

She and Siegfried had much in common besides their age.  They shared a concern about the place of art, music and literature in the context of the ongoing conflict that, at the time, had no end in sight. Sassoon's wide interest in the arts drew him to composers (such as William Walton) and musicians, and he expresses his despair in the poem "Dead Musicians", included in his 1918 collection, Counter-Attack.

Whatever he may have made of the flamboyant Madame Suggia herself, the occasion was one he would treasure in his memory.  In Siegfried's Journey, he writes how they listened to her play "in the reverberant chamber of a lonely and historic castle - her 'cello's eloquence accompanied only by the beat and wash and murmur of waves breaking against the rocks below the windows".  He felt he had "arrived at the end of a pilgrimage, to find peace and absolution in an hour of incomparable music", which took him out of his general wartime mood of depression.

He sent Suggia a copy of Counter-Attack.  In return for the gift, she wrote from the castle to say that his poems were "the finest thing I read for a long time".  The original letter, dated 25 September 1918, is in the Sassoon archive at Cambridge University Library.  Evidently he kept it and treasured it as he did the memory of that wonderful afternoon at Lindisfarne.

A Friendship

Having mentioned T. E. Lawrence in my previous blog, I felt I had not done justice to his role in the life and literary development of Siegfried Sassoon, so I thought I might use this blog to make some amends for that.

Robin Lindsay (a nephew of Helen Waddell) told me that Lawrence was one of the subjects that came up in conversation when he visited Siegfried at Heytesbury in the early 1960s to give him the famous recording of one of Helen’s broadcasts.  This was because of the recent release of David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, which Sassoon must have been to the cinema to view.  He commented that the screen portrayal was “nothing like” the Lawrence he had known.  This is perhaps unsurprising: the slight, plain-looking man who was one of Siegfried's most valued friends from 1918 until his death in 1935 was not movie material - as was proven when the Korda brothers rejected Sassoon's proposals for the script of a film about him.  

Sassoon cannot be said to have cultivated Lawrence's friendship, at least not in the early days.  The latter owed much of his international fame to the efforts of an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who arrived in Palestine during the First World War looking for a sensational story.  On his return to the USA in 1919, he began lecturing on the subject, with the assistance of a film show which no doubt explains the popularity he immediately enjoyed.  The film, entitled With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, made Lawrence internationally famous, to the extent that the shy colonel sought to hide from the limelight by joining the RAF under the assumed name of John Hume Ross, later becoming T E Shaw and joining the Royal Tank Corps.  (When Sassoon visited Lawrence at home in 1924, Lawrence showed him a book he had been given by George Bernard Shaw, inscribed "To Private Shaw from Public Shaw".)

Thus, when Sassoon and Lawrence met for the first time towards the end of 1918, it was as near-equals. They were introduced, at Lawrence's instigation, by Edward Marsh.  Lawrence outranked Sassoon (who was two years older), but Sassoon knew something of Lawrence's wartime activities, and they hit it off straight away.  When Lawrence got around to publishing his own account of his time with the Arabs, under the title Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in 1922, Sassoon was one of the first people to be allowed to read it.  He was obliged to reassure Lawrence of the book's worth, referring to it as a "bloody masterpiece", in a letter which ended, "It is a GREAT BOOK, blast you!" 

Many have speculated on Lawrence's sexuality.  Like Sassoon, he felt an attraction to his fellow-servicemen, but this is far from conclusive.  I have never heard or seen any evidence that even suggests that he might have had a romantic or physical relationship with Siegfried.  It is, however, fairly well attested that Lawrence had masochistic tendencies, and we can only hazard a guess as to the psychological trigger for these.  Much seems to have remained private between the two friends; it seems to me highly likely that Sassoon either did not know or did not care what Lawrence did in his own time.

In due course, Lawrence came to share Sassoon's friendship with Thomas Hardy, who was equally fond of both men, just as Florence Hardy was attracted to both.  Lawrence had settled at Clouds Hill, near Wareham in Dorset, in the mid-1920s, half an hour's motorcycle ride from the Hardys.  In 1934, Siegfried Sassoon moved into Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, around 45 miles away, but there is no truth in the often-heard claim that Lawrence was returning home from Heytesbury when he was involved in the accident that ended his life in May 1935.  

After colliding with a cyclist in a country road near his cottage, Lawrence lay in a coma for six days. His head injuries (in those days before crash helmets became common) were so serious that it was clear he could not recover; King George V sent his personal physician just to make sure there was nothing that could be done.  The news was devastating for Sassoon, but it led to a life-changing experience.  The day after Lawrence's death, he felt he had received a sign from his dead friend, a sign that convinced him of the existence of an after-life, and this would indirectly lead to his embracing Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism, two decades later.  

Sassoon's poem on the subject was submitted to The Times, but rejected by none other than Edward Marsh.  Perhaps he felt that Siegfried was still suffering from the shock of Lawrence's death and that the experience about which he wrote was "all in the mind".  It rather makes me think of the initial reaction to Sassoon's early war poems and the horror expressed by most of his friends when he put himself in the firing-line with his "Soldier's Declaration".  How little vision they had.

To learn more about the friendship between Lawrence and Sassoon, you could do worse than to read Dennis Silk's monograph on the subject, printed in 2010 by Reading Room Press - if you can get hold of it.  If not, help is at hand, as the lecture Dennis gave, on which the booklet is based, was recorded by the IWM and can be found here: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80030132 

Loving The Lamb

People do love our annual joint meetings with the Wilfred Owen Association, at The Lamb in Bloomsbury.  Actually, 14^thMarch this year was the third time in twelve months that the SSF had visited the pub, since we held our AGM there in the autumn.  No one seemed to mind making an extra visit, given the opportunity to visit a historic and atmospheric building with a great atmosphere and at the same time enjoy good food and drink as well as the company of friends and some great talks from top-rated speakers.

I dare not include myself in that last group, as I was very much a stand-in last Saturday.  The room was comfortably full (not too crowded, as it has sometimes been in the past) for a lecture by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver of Whitman College, Washington, USA, the author of the 2010 classic, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War,  now re-issued in paperback.  Her subject was “The underworld journey in Owen, Sassoon, Graves, and Aldington”.  Professor Vandiver spoke about how these poets approached the topic of the afterlife in their work, and I will not attempt to give a full résumé here, as those of you who are members will see one in Siegfried’s Journal soon enough.

One of the matters Elizabeth focused on was the way in which the individual poets’ educational background affected their treatment of death and the afterlife.  Wilfred Owen, being a grammar school boy, treats the subject more straightforwardly than the others with their public school background – with the possible exception of Sassoon, who appears to be bending over backwards not to reveal his classical education in his satirical war poems.  I agreed wholeheartedly with Elizabeth’s view that this was deliberate.  Sassoon’s concern was to convey his feelings about the war in language that everyone could understand, and his success in doing so was his great achievement.  Today (in my opinion) he remains the most accessible of the major war poets.

Insights into the classical education of the boys who would go on to become junior officers as well as poets have been given in past SSF meetings and conferences by speakers such as Vivien Whelpton, Michael Copp and Gladys Mary Coles.  Thinking back to these, I was surprised that I seemed to have overlooked such an obvious aspect of Sassoon’s war poetry as his avoidance of any intellectual element that might create a barrier between him and his intended audience.  Elizabeth’s comments were a revelation, and, in my own subsequent talk (on the subject of Sassoon’s relationship with Thomas Hardy), I was able to go some way towards demonstrating the correctness of her observations by quoting a passage from his diary from which it is clear that, though he may not have been an academic success, he had not forgotten his knowledge of the Classics.  This appears to demonstrate that it was a conscious decision on his part to leave the classical references out of his poetry, at least during the war years.

It was good to see so many familiar faces at The Lamb, but also several new ones.  Unlike many other literary societies, we have a good gender and age balance among our membership, which has stood us in good stead so far and should continue to do so.  The grandly-named "Empire Room", where we always have to open the windows because of the mass of warm bodies within, has become a home from home, whilst landlord Leigh and his team, dashing around trying to serve thirty different menu choices, are now familiar faces.   Long may the joint spring meeting continue!

Exceedingly Good Poems

Were it not for the wonderful Mr Michael Wood (how come he hasn't been knighted yet?) the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rudyard Kipling might have passed me by altogether.  In his column in this month's BBC History magazine, Michael points out that "writers are made by their times", an astute observation from someone whose first occupation is not literature - although who can forget his wonderful documentary series on Shakespeare?

Quite rightly, he points out the dichotomy between Kipling's two sides - as both champion and critic of the British Empire.  Siegfried Sassoon's response to Kipling's work was equally ambivalent.  He certainly admired Kipling as a writer, but became self-conscious about this as he gradually realised how closely associated the latter was becoming with Establishment and Empire.  It was by now recognised that his Just So Stories, which so many of his critics had enjoyed as children, represented the colonial lifestyle that was already not merely out of fashion, but had fallen out of favour with some - though it would be many decades before it died out altogether.

One thing Siegfried Sassoon and Rudyard Kipling had in common was that they lived in the south-east of England at the same time, though Kipling did not move there until 1897, having previously lived in India, South Africa and the United States, as well as other parts of the UK.  Eventually, in 1902, he and his American wife Carrie settled permanently at Bateman’s, a Jacobean house near Burwash, now in East Sussex.  The house and gardens now belong to the National Trust and are open to the public, and come highly recommended (by me).  This was Kipling's home until his death in 1936.

John Kipling

Kipling's son John would have been four or five years old when the family moved into Bateman's.  He was born at their previous home, "The Elms" in Rottingdean (also in Sussex).  John's story is widely known, having been adapted into a play, My Boy Jack.  Kipling's attitude towards Jack is seen by many as having brought about the young man's death, and this outcome is generally regarded as a just punishment for his father.  Severely short-sighted, the boy was turned down at least twice for military service before Kipling senior used his influence to get him a commission in the Irish Guards, aged only seventeen.  He lasted about a month at the Western Front, before going missing in September 1915.

As for Rudyard Kipling, his activities as a government propagandist made him unpopular with liberals and the literary fraternity, even before the war.  When a nervous Sassoon met Rupert Brooke for the first time, he made the mistake of assuming that Brooke would share this opinion, and commented (according to his own account of the occasion) that Kipling's poetry was "terribly tub-thumping stuff".  Brooke disagreed, pointing to "Cities and Thrones and Powers", which Siegfried was forced to admit he had never read.

By a strange coincidence, Kipling died, aged 70, two days before King George V, who was six months his senior.  For some years, Kipling had been writing the King's most important speeches, and his 1922 poem, "The King's Pilgrimage", describes a visit made by George V to the battlefields of Europe to visit the graves of those killed in the service of Empire during the War.  Jack's grave was not, of course, among them, as his body had never been identified.  Kipling was by now a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, perhaps helping to assuage some of his own paternal grief by writing inscriptions to commemorate other men's sons.  "Known unto God" (on the graves of unidentified soldiers) and "The Glorious Dead" (on the Cenotaph at Whitehall) are just two of the phrases he coined.

I would not dream of passing myself off as a Kipling expert, but my own feelings towards his work were considerably softened by Meg Crane's reading of his wonderful short story, "The Gardener", to the coachload of Sassoonites who travelled to Ypres in 2010.  If you were among them, I know you will remember it too.  If you haven't read it, try to do so and you will understand why I will stop at that. 

A Tank Named Deborah

This summer some of us will once again be enjoying a War Poets' Tour guided by the omniscient Vivien Whelpton and the indefatigable Clive Harris, this time to the Cambrai region of France, forever associated in many people's minds with the first major use of tanks in battle during the First World War.

Siegfried Sassoon does not seem to have been a fan of tanks, if his poem "Blighters" is anything to go by.  What he actually seems to have objected to is the response of the non-combatant British public to the success of the new weapon.  His use of the word "Blighters" is a pun on the term "Blighty" to refer to his home country, where these people sit comfortably ensconced in a cinema, watching a propaganda film that was to cause a sensation.

Although I don't particularly love tanks in themselves, I am looking forward to Cambrai for a particular reason.  A couple of years back, while surfing the web in search of further information about Edward Horner (see Philip Guest’s article in Siegfried's Journal vol 21 for details of the man whose equestrian statue adorns the parish church at Mells where Siegfried Sassoon is buried), I came across a snippet that intrigued me.  

A gentleman named Philippe Gorcynski had, it seemed, excavated a tank that had been abandoned during World War I near the village of Flesquieres, and was hoping to make it the centrepiece of a new museum.  Horner himself was killed in the Battle of Cambrai (20-21 November 1917), aged 28. I have heard him referred to as "the real-life 'Downton Abbey' WWI hero", whatever that may mean.

“Deborah” (or, more prosaically, D51), was excavated in 1998 by a team of archaeologists from Arras, and now resides in a barn awaiting promotion to future glory.  There it stands on a base constructed of granite cobbles from the streets of the old town of Cambrai.  The tank itself - or herself, if you like – has been designated a Historical French Monument.  During the battle, Deborah was attached to No. 12 Section of the 12th Company, commanded by Captain G Nixon.  Three months before the battle, the tank had already been damaged during an action in Flanders and subsequently repaired.  

As the troops entered Flesquieres, they were forced back by sniper and machine-gun fire, and Deborah was put out of action by field guns.  2/Lt Frank Heap of the 4th [D] Btn. Tank Corps, leading the tank crew, received the MC for his efforts on that day; five of his eight-man crew were killed.  The following day, when it was discovered by Scottish infantry, four of the men were buried next to the tank, the other some distance away (the bodies were later interred at Flesquieres Hill British Cemetery).

Some time after the battle, Deborah was pulled 900 yards from her resting-place by other British tanks, and was buried in a hole dug by the Germans before the battle.  The tank was then used as a shelter until the Germans re-took the village in March 1918. For more details of the research behind the discovery and restoration of the tank, it is well worth having a look at the website of the museum project: http://www.tank-cambrai.com/english/association/the-museum-project.php 

My husband has been a great tank enthusiast since his youth, so I felt obliged to appraise him of my findings.  His comment: “How can I fail to go and visit a tank called Deborah?  It combines the two great loves of my life.”

If you would like to join us, you may still be able to get a place on the tour: http://www.battle-honours.eu/WFA-Poets-Tour  Hope to see you there!

The Road to Wrexham

Trying to plan the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship's annual conference is always a challenge.  Unlike most other societies, the SSF does not have a permanent “base”.  This is great from the point of view of attracting new members and giving everyone the opportunity to attend events.   It’s a boon for those who don’t live in London and the South-East of England.  However, it does lead to a certain unpredictability in terms of attendances, which in itself leads to difficulty in setting prices, choosing a venue, ordering catering, finding accommodation, and all the other little things that have to be borne in mind at conference time.  I often have cause to be grateful that our annual conference is essentially only a one-day event (though, over the years, it has grown into a fun weekend for those involved, with plenty of opportunity for social contact and visits to places of interest).

Wrexham, although fairly central in geographical terms, is considered by many to be out in the wilds, simply because it is not located at a motorway junction and the rail journey from London requires a change of train.  Those who think the journey is too much trouble might do well to recall that Siegfried Sassoon loved to travel up there to see his friends Bobbie and Dorothy Hanmer.   Of course, the rail service in the UK was at that time far superior to what it became after Dr Beeching got his hands on it; nevertheless, it would have been a long journey for Siegfried, and not a particularly comfortable one.

Bobbie and Dorothy's family, the Hanmers, are a great name in the history of Wales.  One of them was actually - albeit briefly - Princess of Wales, if you accept that Margaret Hanmer's husband, Owain Glyndwr, had a right to the title he assumed around 1400.   The Hanmers, although English, were well integrated into the border community, as much at home in Flintshire as they were in Shropshire; the village of Hanmer lies within the present County Borough of Wrexham.  A baronetcy was created in 1620 and survives to this day.  That Siegfried knew the area is confirmed by his decision to call his regiment "The Flintshire Fusiliers" in his fictionalised autobiography.

The Hanmers are not, however, the main reason for choosing Wrexham as our next conference venue.  The fact is that Wrexham is the location of the Royal Welch Fusiliers' regimental archive, and this year is the centenary of Sassoon joining the regiment.   Although Siegfried chose the RWF partly because Bobbie Hanmer had already enlisted in it, he did not see much of him afterwards; a Carmarthenshire clergyman's son, David Thomas, quickly took Bobbie's place in his affections, and you can learn more about David's background in an article that will feature in the forthcoming edition of Siegfried's Journal.  The regiment also brought Sassoon into contact with another younger man who would make a significant impact on his life and work - Robert Graves.

Like Sassoon, Graves was English, but he had closer links with Wales, where his family had settled.  Although very different in temperament, Sassoon and Graves were brought together, initially by a love of literature, and compared notes on their approach to writing verse on the subject of war, with the already battle-hardened Graves telling Sassoon he would soon change his mind and abandon his conventional patriotic stance.  It was Sassoon's humility in admitting he had been wrong that eventually enabled him to become a more effective war poet than Graves.

You will have noted that Sassoon did not join the Fusiliers until the spring of 1915.  Those unfamiliar with his life story may be wondering what he was doing in the meantime.  He had spent the period between the outbreak of war the previous year and the receipt of his commission in the RWF as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, a role that had at first appealed to him because of his love of horses and riding.  It turned out to be a bad move because the Yeomanry did not get called to the Front.  While exercising his officer's horse in October 1914, Siegfried fell and broke his arm, and it was while laid up that he made the decision to seek a commission in a regiment that was already actively involved in the war.

It has often been commented on that the Royal Welch Fusiliers could boast among its officers and men a disproportionate number of notable writers, the best-known (apart from Graves and Sassoon) being David Jones, Llewelyn Wyn Griffith, Frank Richards (not the creator of Billy Bunter) and the Welsh-language poet Ellis Humphrey Evans, better known by his bardic name of "Hedd Wyn".  Finally, there was the medical officer J. C. Dunn, whose memoir, The War The Infantry Knew, is considered a minor masterpiece of its kind.

At the time of writing, I cannot say exactly which aspects of Sassoon's career in the RWF are going to be most strongly highlighted at the conference, except that Sassoon's relationship with Graves will definitely be featured, as will the topic of Great War fiction.  For those who are interested in the military side of things, there will certainly be something to learn, and at the same time I can assure those who are not remotely interested in the technicalities of war that there will be plenty of literary talk to keep you awake!