Can a Poet be a Nice Person?

This was the question I found myself asking after I’d watched two documentaries last week.  One was about Ted Hughes, famously married to Sylvia Plath who then famously committed suicide.  Not so many people know that the “other woman” in the case, having had Hughes’s child, then also killed herself (and the child), apparently because of his indifference to her.  Feminists have long blamed Hughes for both suicides, but Frieda, his daughter by Plath, doesn’t seem to.  She remembers him as a good and loving father, who has inspired her to write poetry of her own.  Hughes himself seems to have been haunted, to his dying day, by the mistakes he made in his relationships.  

I subsequently watched Return to Larkinland, in which A N Wilson analysed Philip Larkin’s attitudes to women.  I once actually met one of the women in Larkin’s life, Maeve Brennan, who was a member of the Barbara Pym Society prior to her death, though at that time I was blissfully ignorant of the details of her affair with Larkin.  Listening to Wilson’s analysis, it was a wonder Larkin ever formed any kind of sexual relationship, what with his ambivalent attitude to his own parents and his generally misanthropic nature.  It was sad to hear that Wilson, having known Larkin personally and liked him, became disenchanted when, following his death, the content of the poet’s diaries became public and it was found he held certain far-right views (though the wisdom of age has brought him to a better understanding now).  What troubles me, and I think most readers, about this is the idea that a writer can produce sensitive and moving work whilst at the same time being quite obnoxious in real life.  Oscar Wilde famously said of George Bernard Shaw: “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”  Presumably Wilde considered himself a friend.

I thought further about this when I attended a talk by publisher Cary Archard on the subject of Alun Lewis’s life and work.  Cary laid emphasis on Lewis’s “likeability” as a person, but it was noticeable that he chose to exclude personal relationships from his analysis, despite the recent publicity, in Lewis’s centenary year, about his affair with Freda Ackroyd.  When I asked him why, he explained that he felt there had been too much concentration on the subject and that it was not relevant to Lewis’s poetry.  Admittedly, Lewis did not meet Freda until 1943, when he had already produced his best work.  But what about Lewis’s wife Gweno, whom he married in 1939?  What about his earlier, unfulfilled relationship with the poet Lynnette Roberts, which certainly provided Roberts with poetic inspiration even if it didn’t have the same effect on Lewis?

Ted Hughes seems to have needed a “muse” to get him going. Yet Philip Larkin’s inspiration dried up late in life, when he was seeing three women simultaneously. Siegfried Sassoon did not begin to produce great poetry until he began to accept his sexuality, and David Thomas was certainly a catalyst, one way or another.  Of course, sex is not the only way in which a poet can stray from the moral path.  Byron is, perhaps, one of the most obvious examples.  He was horrible to his wife and mistresses alike (Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”), yet there was something that attracted them to him.  His love for his illegitimate daughter Allegra is well-known, though he appears to have had little interest in the rest of his progeny.

Browsing the web in search of further examples, I came across – believe it or not – a list of ten poets considered by the webmaster as mad, bad and/or dangerous to know, in order of their badness.  Tenth on the list came Franҫois Villon, the 16^th century French thief and murderer who remains one of France’s most notable poets.  Byron himself only comes in at number six.  So who is top?  Naturally it’s not an Englishman.  Italian Fascist poet Prince Gabriele D’Annunzio takes the title, partly for his political views but also for his propensity towards cannibalism and insistence on his housekeeper providing him with sex three times a day.  Unfortunately I don’t have enough Italian to judge the quality of d’Annunzio’s verse, but it would seem his fellow-countrymen still hold his literary output in some regard.

Other poets on the list include Swinburne, Shelley, Baudelaire, Pushkin and the Earl of Rochester.  Whatever we may think of their private goings-on, they certainly produced some good poetry.  Indeed, I find that it is very difficult to locate a prominent poet who didn’t have, at the very least, a tangled love life.  Even Thomas Hardy, that grand old man beloved of all who knew him, is alleged to have treated both his wives badly. Nevertheless, judging by the devotion he inspired among his contemporaries, Hardy must have been “nice”, at least to one’s face.

The most obviously less-than-nice of the war poets is possibly Robert Graves.  Even while writing of their friendship in the trenches, Siegfried Sassoon noted that Graves was much disliked by his fellow-officers, and he doesn't seem to have improved with age.  His ménage à trois with his wife Nancy and the American "poet" Laura Riding didn't keep any of them happy.  He was condescending to other poets, appointing himself Owen's prime critic, and taking Siegfried's traumatic personal experiences to use as fodder for his own memoirs.  Even the magnanimous Edmund Blunden (himself no stranger to marital break-ups) was offended by his conduct.  In the event, Graves's personality has not made his poetry and prose any less popular.

I'd contend that poets and other writers are, on the whole, no worse than the general public.  Divorce is rife these days, but even when it was rare, marital discord was no less common.  Looking at the non-literary world, it is difficult to find a marriage or relationship that hasn’t had its problems, sometimes critical, sometimes less disruptive.  However much affection Siegfried may have inspired in his friends, he was quite capable of unkind or anti-social behaviour.  I wonder how much decent poetry he would have produced if he had been a saint.

On Wenlock Edge

In my previous blog, I perhaps neglected to mention that, when Siegfried Sassoon drove from Ludlow to the “Hydro” at Church Stretton, he did so by way of Wenlock Edge, a section of the Shropshire landscape made famous by A E Housman in his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad.  Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney were among those inspired to write music by these poems, which gradually came to be regarded as a prophesy of the disruption of the rural way of life by the effects of the First World War.

Nowadays, the Edge is designated a site of special scientific interest for its limestone outcrops, whilst remaining a popular route for walkers.  Neither of the two best-known hills in the area (sometimes known as Little Switzerland), the Long Mynd and the Wrekin, is actually part of Wenlock Edge.  Although quite different from Sassoon’s beloved Weald of Kent, we can immediately see the appeal of this rolling - and sometimes rather pointy - countryside for him, and no doubt he also enjoyed pushing his little car to its mechanical limits on the quiet rural roads.  Automotive performance would seem to have improved little since 1924, however; on arrival at Lichfield he boasts in his diary of having done 200 miles on four gallons of petrol. Perhaps this is because cars in the 1920s, although capable of high speeds, were not really built for them, and the roads in Shropshire certainly would not have lent themselves to fast driving.

What associations Wenlock Edge may have had for Sassoon are not entirely clear from his diary entries. “Went across Wenlock Edge by Roman Bank to Church Stretton” is about all he tells us of the journey. Housman himself is mentioned three times in the published diaries for 1921-25, but never with any clue as to what Sassoon thought of his verse. However, we know that (in addition to Lionel Johnson's Essays, which brought him Robert Graves' friendship), he had taken a copy of A Shropshire Lad to the trenches with him. Housman was one of the poets Sassoon approached when he was planning the birthday tribute to Thomas Hardy in 1919. Although his best-known work was twenty years in the past, Housman was still very active as a lecturer, and was one of the names Sassoon's agent complained were dominating the post-war speaker circuit. In 1933, he would publish his lecture on the subject of "The Name and Nature of Poetry", which struck a chord with Siegfried; they shared the view that poetry should appeal to the emotions. There are already signs of Housman's influence in many of the war poems. Whether Housman had any admiration for Sassoon's work is less certain, since he wrote to an associate in 1931, complaining that Heinemann wanted to print one of his poems in "a wretched selection containing, for instance, six pieces of Sassoon's".

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was a native of Worcestershire, studied Classics at Oxford, and worked at the Patent Office in London.  Like Sassoon, he failed to complete his degree course, though he was undoubtedly more academically-inclined and spent the last 25 years of his life as a Cambridge professor.  Also like Sassoon, Housman had homosexual proclivities, and became very attached to a fellow-student at Oxford who, sadly, did not return his feelings.  The book that made him famous, A Shropshire Lad, was written while he lived in London, and published privately after Housman had failed to interest a publisher; this was another experience he shared with Sassoon.  

Yet the selection of Shropshire as a setting for his great work seems almost accidental.   The evocative phrases “blue remembered hills” and “land of lost content” both originate from Housman’s poems, but, although his ashes are buried at Ludlow, he spent little time in the county, and once confessed that the settings for the poems were “not exactly a real place”.  The hills of southern Shropshire, neighbouring his home county, evidently held some fascination for him. Perhaps precisely because they were not his home, they provoked a longing that could not be satisfied, a kind of Shangri-La that could never be achieved.

The A E Housman Society has been going for 43 years. This is not surprising, given the continued popularity and apparently timeless appeal of A Shropshire Lad. Long may it continue.

At the Hydro

Serendipity is perhaps not quite the word for it, but whenever I go on a “road trip”, I always seem to collide with some obscure fact about Siegfried Sassoon, some place where he has been or stayed or that is associated with one of his many friends and associates.  Sassoon himself was a great one for road trips.  He seems to have enjoyed travelling for the sake of it.  Thus, though he would usually make the journey specifically in order to visit a friend or see a specific sight, he would stop off en route to admire the countryside.  The list of hotels in the UK where he stayed for one or two nights is long, and I have often considered taking a little trip of my own to re-trace his steps.  Maybe when I retire…

At our recent Wrexham conference, a member suggested that we should consider holding a future event at the Longmynd Hotel in Church Stretton, where Siegfried spent a night in September 1924.  As it was on my way home, I called in the following morning to try to discover what might have appealed to him about this small town in Shropshire.  I could imagine that the centre of the town might not have changed that much since the 1920s, and old photographs would seem to confirm this.  Church Stretton still has many quaint old shops and buildings.  The hotel, which I finally located at the summit of a long and winding road, clearly dates from the early 20th century and was in fact built as a "Hydro".   In a previous blog post, I mistakenly said that the hotel where he stayed was no longer a hotel, but it is only the name that has changed.   In 1924, it still went by the name of the Hydropathic Hotel.  Siegfried's diary calls it simply "The Hotel".

Siegfried reached Church Stretton after driving from Ross-on-Wye, where he had spent the previous night. Earlier in the day he had been in Hereford listening to music at the cathedral, where he just missed Sir Adrian Boult. From there he went on to Ludlow.  At the famous 17th century Feathers Hotel, where he lunched, he found he had just missed Lady Ottoline Morrell. From Ludlow, it was a short journey of about 18 miles to Church Stretton, and he was there in time for tea.

He records in his diary that the hotel brought back bitter-sweet memories of happier times.  He had stayed there almost a decade earlier, when visiting the area with some companions from his regiment, the RWF. The diary claims that he cannot recollect whether one of these was David Thomas, or possibly Bobbie Hanmer.  At one time Siegfried felt tenderness towards Bobbie of the same sort he felt towards David, but it nevertheless seems odd that he would confuse the two.

There are several factors that may help to explain this episode of forgetfulness.  Siegfried had been mentally ill during the last stages of the First World War - not in the same way that Ivor Gurney (for example) was mentally ill, but nevertheless quite enough for it to have affected his memory.  His diary jogged his memory about a number of things, but perhaps he had never recorded the previous visit in writing.  In 1915 he had not long met "Tommy", the man who would become so important to him. As he comments, "Strange to think that on that day I knew so few of my present circle of friends."   On the surface, it seems more likely that it was indeed David Thomas who had been with him, rather than Bobbie Hanmer; he had been acquainted with the latter for longer, though more superficially, and one would think he would have remembered more clearly if he had been one of the party.  Of the two, however, it was David who was shipped out to France at the same time as Siegfried later in 1915, and who became much closer to him.  Could it be that David and Bobbie were both members of that earlier party?

Siegfried also records in his diary that he went for a walk up the hill after tea.  No doubt he went as far as the recently-erected war memorial towards the top of the hill, in the form of a Celtic cross, the sight of which would have opened up further sores, unpleasant memories from his military career.  On returning to the hotel, he had dinner, accompanied by half a bottle of German wine, and had a quiet evening alone.

From Church Stretton he would make an even shorter drive to his next stop, Shrewsbury, where he made a point of not visiting Wilfred Owen’s mother Susan.  He was feeling "unsociable" - a state not uncommon in Siegfried, despite the wide circle of friends he could boast.  That night he would bed down at the George Hotel in Lichfield, a city where I once spent a very pleasant literary weekend, courtesy of the Samuel Johnson Society.  Siegfried commented that "the Midlands feel friendly after the Welsh hills", a rather curious comment coming from a reserved Englishman.  Consistency was never his strong point.

Disappointingly, when I reached the entrance to the Longmynd Hotel, I found a notice on the door that pronounced, somewhat apologetically, that "The hotel is no longer open to non-residents".  I went inside anyway, and found no one in the reception area to tell me to get out, but there was nothing much to see.   Perhaps, like Siegfried, the present management were feeling unsociable.

Where two or three are gathered together...

The Wrexham conference has been in the planning for some time, so it was a great disappointment to me when I realised the numbers were way down on our last conference in Cardiff.  There seems to have been no single specific reason for this.  Some people found the location “remote”, yet we have plenty of members in the north-west, Wales and the Midlands who theoretically should have found it easier than travelling to the south-east or south-west.  For whatever reason, no new faces appeared, unless you count our two wonderful speakers, Charles Mundye and Jonathan Hicks, both of them established members of the Fellowship. 

A returning “old” face, if he’ll forgive me, is Graham Lampard, who was a member of the SSF committee for some years in the early history of the Fellowship and is now back on board, taking the place vacated by Phil Carradice.  So once more we have a full committee, standing to attention in the service of our members, ready to do battle with ignorance, apathy, and anything else that may stand in the way of our continued success as a literary society.

The venue, Wrexham Museum, is very convenient and well-appointed.  As luck would have it, they were putting on an exhibition about local breweries in the courtyard outside, which led to several members of the committee spending most of their lunch break sampling alcoholic beverages – including the famous Wrexham Lager, first brewed in 1881 by German immigrants, discontinued in 2000, and now available again as a result of the construction of a new factory in 2011.  The drink was popular enough to be stocked on board HMS Titanic in 1912.  Sad to say, during the First World War, the brewery’s German head brewer was interned as an enemy alien, and sales were adversely affected by anti-German prejudice.  I can’t help wondering whether Siegfried, with his German name, ever tried it.

The RWF was an incubator for a number of well-known First World War poets and writers, including Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones and Hedd Wyn.  You can read more about the regiment and its literary heritage in Phil Carradice’s blog post on the subject here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/entries/3d274d6c-ddc8-3c3c-a7a0-273879f69180

Additional light was thrown on “that astonishing infantry” (to quote Napier’s History of the Peninsular War) by Jonathan Hicks’s account of the Welsh at Mametz Wood, an action in which Siegfried Sassoon was directly involved.  Jonathan’s gripping illustrated talk had the audience on the edge of its collective seat, particularly when he produced a few impressive props.  Charles Mundye, President of the Robert Graves Society, followed up with an account of the friendship formed between Graves and Sassoon when they met as junior officers in the RWF and how they briefly collaborated on Graves’ proposed collection entitled The Patchwork Flag, which was never published although some of the constituent poems were.  I subsequently came across Charles's podcast about Graves on the web, which is well worth listening to: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/your-lips-my-life-hung-robert-graves-and-war

Graves undoubtedly influenced Sassoon in his poetic direction and helped him find his true “voice”, but he has never been popular with Sassoonites.  The two men fell out as a result of the publication of Graves’ war memoir Goodbye to All That in 1929; things were never the same between them after that, and Graves is regarded by some as an insensitive egotist as well as an unreliable witness.  When curator Karen Murdoch brought out her boxes of Sassoon-related papers after the tea break, however, conference delegates were able to view and handle historic documents, including letters by Graves himself, J C Dunn and Edmund Blunden, as well as officers’ handbooks issued to Sassoon, in some of which he had doodled, drawn sketches, or written additional comments in pencil.  No one minded that he'd had no emotional attachment to these books; the mere fact that they had been carried around in his pockets seemed to bring us closer to him.

After-dinner entertainment has become a tradition in recent years, and this year we were lucky to have as a guest another Oxford academic, the distinguished poet and writer Patrick McGuinness, who kindly read to us from his collection Other People’s Countries.  Lowering the tone somewhat, this year’s “producer”, our Vice-Chair Christian Major, rehearsed a small group of gentlemen in an extract from Goodbye to All That, featuring Bev Steele as the hapless Private 99 Davies, caught red-handed causing a “public nuisance” while off-duty in Wrexham.  Colonel Major dealt out justice with assistance from Sgt-Major Gray, Sergeant Timmins/Clinch and Corporal Jones/Lampard, as well as prisoner’s escort Adrian Wells, and the result was laughter.

Bloomsbury in the Bathroom

The Bloomsbury group seem to be a popular subject at the moment.  No sooner had they featured in Victoria Coren’s series on Bohemianism (see my post from last month) than Vivien Whelpton was taking a group of Sassoon and Owen enthusiasts on a walk around that district of London, pointing out such sights as the location of the Poetry Bookshop.  Next thing you know, the BBC is showing a dramatisation of the careers of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell; perhaps this is not such a coincidence, “themes” being the broadcasting corporation’s latest big thing.

Then, purely by chance, Strange Meetings comes to the top of my bedside book pile and I find myself re-reading Harry Ricketts’ account of the historic encounter between Sassoon and Rupert Brooke at Eddie Marsh’s flat in Raymond Buildings.  The SSF has visited Raymond Buildings twice, but never been able to gain access (people must have thought we were bonkers, standing in such an unprepossessing side street reading poetry out loud).   Vivien’s group did somehow manage to get onto the premises, though I get the impression there was nothing particularly inspiring to be found within the walls; one would have to work hard to reproduce the atmosphere of those heady days, a century ago, when Brooke and his literary friends frequented the area.

Brooke was well-acquainted with Virginia Woolf, so much so that he once invited her to come skinny-dipping with him.  If Life in Squares is anything to go by, this was a bit of a trend for the family; Vanessa Bell was shown sharing the bathroom with her husband’s gay friend, the artist Duncan Grant, who later became her lover.  Brooke, despite – or perhaps because of – his angelic appearance, had relationships with many women (and some men) before his untimely death.  Like most of the writers who were part of the Bloomsbury Group, he also had a nice line in satire.  Having felt out of his depth in the discussion at Marsh’s breakfast, Sassoon went to the zoo and got an equally cool reception from the chimpanzees, which he then recorded in a poem that attempted to emulate Brooke’s style.

  

For the benefit of anyone who may have had as much difficulty as I did following the early scenes of Life in Squares, Vanessa and Virginia were the daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, who, besides being a writer and critic, was an accomplished mountaineer.  In addition, he was an Anglican clergyman with "strong opinions" (as Virginia put it), who believed in long walks and “muscular Christianity”.  In addition, he had two sons.  The older of these, Thoby, became the head of the family when Sir Leslie died, and is shown encouraging his sisters to follow their natural instincts now that their father is out of the way.  The younger brother, Adrian, shared in the Thursday night gatherings that formed the basis of the Bloomsbury Group, and had a homosexual relationship with Duncan Grant, whom he introduced into the gathering.  Great things were expected of Thoby Stephen, who shocked everyone by dying of typhoid, aged 26, and never fulfilling his promise.

You will already have gathered that the web of inter-relationships, both intellectual and sexual, is extremely complicated.  Bloomsbury must have been a little like Coronation Street, with every cast member at some stage becoming involved with every other cast member.  I think, however, that the general public has greater difficulty feeling any empathy with the Bloomsberries than it does with the fictional characters of popular soap operas.  George Simmers has already picked up on a lot of this in his blog so I need not elaborate further.

Naturally, the most interesting thing about the Bloomsbury Group, from my point of view, is their tenuous connection with Siegfried Sassoon, achieved partly through the activities of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who generously gave “jobs” on her estate to men like Duncan Grant and Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband) during World War I to save them from having to take the punishments handed out to other conscientious objectors. Ottoline, incidentally, is alleged to have tried to lure Grant to come nude bathing with her in a Garsington fishpond.

Siegfried Sassoon would become a friend of several other members of the Bloomsbury Group, including E M Forster and John Maynard Keynes; most had, like him, been undergraduates at Cambridge.  Sassoon was not, however, a man who would ever have accepted a labouring job (which would have been a piece of cake for someone of his physical attributes) rather than facing the music.  We can be thankful that he chose to make his protest against the war in other ways.

Siegfried also knew Lytton Strachey and another "Bloomsberry", the critic Desmond McCarthy, well.  He claimed that Strachey’s intellect and gentility made him feel inferior, like “a beefy young rowing blue”.  Was this the reason he did not become a member of the group?  I think not; they were a well-established clique, together since 1905 and not open to new members (apart from relatives) by the time Siegfried came into close contact with them.  Nevertheless, his sense of inferiority must have acted to prevent him getting onto intimate terms with the group as a whole, as shown by his reluctance to accept a dinner invitation from Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1923 because he feared a “rarified intellectual atmosphere”; he was greatly relieved to find himself taken into their fold – though Virginia’s affection for him seems to have been tempered with a lack of understanding of his character and experiences.  In this, no doubt, she resembled many people, especially women, who had had little or no direct contact with the reality of war.  Although herself a Modernist, she sympathised with his dislike of T S Eliot, but thought him behind the times, as did the Sitwells, with whom he had been friendly for some years.

Sassoon's relationship with the  Woolf family, however, continues through Cecil Woolf, his wife Jean Moorcroft Wilson, and their “War Poets” series of monographs as well as through Dr Wilson’s magnificent two-volume biography of Sassoon.  

High Society

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may be expecting this post to be about cricket, since you would be aware that the annual match between Matfield Cricket Club and Sherston's XI took place last weekend.  Much as I enjoy watching cricket, something even more interesting happened to me on my way down to Kent.  

Polesden Lacey, near Dorking, although it belongs to the National Trust, is not a particularly old house by British standards.  It was built in the early years of the twentieth century, on the site of an older house, and soon afterwards sold to a society couple, the Grevilles, who moved in the very best circles.  Following her husband’s untimely death (though of course after a seemly period of mourning), Mrs Greville continued to entertain on a lavish scale.  Her visitors included King Edward VII and later his grandson, the Duke of York (who would become King George VI); the latter spent part of his honeymoon at Polesden Lacey.

As I looked around the photographs of Mrs Greville with some of her eminent friends, my eye was caught by a guest list that included the name “Arthur Sassoon”.  This is not really surprising; Arthur, a paternal uncle of Siegfried’s, was a wealthy banker who became a close associate of Edward VII.  He and his equally notable wife Louise lived in Brighton, where the King would sometimes stay while visiting his mistress, Mrs Keppel.  When Arthur died childless in 1912, he left over half a million pounds to the children of his brother Reuben. (Siegfried, son of his disgraced brother Alfred, got nothing.)

You may be thinking that this is not a very exciting discovery; what interested me was that the National Trust guide told me that Siegfried himself also visited Polesden Lacey.  Unfortunately the visitors’ books are not on open access, though I believe they are available to bona fide researchers, so I could not confirm what year his visit took place, or whether he was there more than once.  The connection appears to be through Osbert Sitwell, a regular visitor who was a close friend of Mrs Greville’s.  He was also, of course, a friend of Siegfried’s, though they fell out regularly.

What this discovery did was simply to confirm my impression that Siegfried got everywhere.  He probably never regarded himself as a member of “Society” – or if he did, with his personal preference for solitude and privacy, he would not have regarded it as being of prime importance. I can just picture him, in the “Gold Room” where Mrs Greville did most of her entertaining, surrounded by braying upper-class voices and perhaps feeling rather out of it at times.  Yet he would have enjoyed the feeling of acceptance that he got from such occasions.  No doubt he was introduced to the assembled company as "the famous war poet" or perhaps, if it was after 1928, as the author of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

Another member of the RWF who was familiar with Polesden Lacey was a chaplain, Maurice Berkeley Peel (a grandson of Sir Robert Peel).  Maurice was almost in his fifties when he volunteered at the outbreak of war.  After a period spent recuperating at Polesden (then in use as a convalescent home) from a wound received at Festubert, Peel returned to civilian life as vicar of Tamworth from 1915 to 1917, with a Military Cross to his name for accompanying his men over the top and working to help the wounded.  He could not rest on his laurels and went out again to France with the RWF, where he was again decorated, the citation reading: "He went out to the advanced patrols with two stretcher-bearers and succeeded in bringing in several wounded men.  Later he worked for 36 hours in front of the captured position and rescued many wounded under very heavy fire."  Finally, in May 1917, Peel was shot dead while again working with the wounded in No Man’s Land.

So many great houses were used during the war as hospitals or homes for the wounded or needy.  The pattern would be repeated in the Second World War, when Siegfried's own home at Heytesbury House would open its doors, first to evacuees and later to American troops.  

Tours, Tanks and Trotter

Another Western Front Association War Poets Tour has come and gone, leaving one small band of enthusiasts suffering serious withdrawal symptoms.  It is, however, very satisfying to note that Siegfried Sassoon is the only poet who has been prominently featured on each of the first four tours, largely as a result of the variety of his military experience and the extent of his geographical travels – but also, I think, because of the quality of his work and his versatility as a poet and prose writer.  So perhaps no coincidence that, for the first time, the majority of passengers on the tour were members of the SSF.

Siegfried, despite his looks, talent and achievements (and most of the female contingent agreed he was the best-looking of the six poets on the cover of this year’s accompanying booklet, with Richard Aldington coming in second), was always vulnerable to self-doubt; he paints a picture of himself as a soldier which is appealing in its modesty.  This is just one of the many secrets of his success.  But of course, it wasn’t all about Siegfried.  Graves, Aldington and Gurney all had a major role this year, and we also focused our attention on some lesser-known poets, such as 26-year-old Bernard Freeman Trotter, a graduate of Canada’s McMaster University and author of the touching “Ici Repose”. 

The tour was more sparsely attended than usual, which was a shame but possibly due to the fact that it covered some of the lesser-known actions of the war, including Loos and Cambrai - the latter, of course, known mainly as the battle where the British forces made their first effective use of tanks.  Anyone who did not book just because they hadn't heard of these actions would have to be uninterested in the literature of the war, as the visits to some of the more obscure battlefields and cemeteries not only protected us from the annoyance often caused by other large groups of tourists but also exposed us to some truly inspiring poetry – and prose - from a large range of writers.  They also missed a two-night stay at one of the best hotels on the Western Front, the Hotel Béatus at Cambrai, with its wonderful gardens, comfortable rooms, friendly staff and excellent restaurant.  And as you can see from the photo, the weather was lovely.

On the third night, unfortunately, we had to move to Lensotel, but were pleasantly surprised that such a large hotel in such an uninspiring location could provide such good service.  For those who do not know the area, Lens is situated in the midst of the coal-mining region of northern France, a district now suffering as much from post-industrial deprivation as most of the traditional coal-mining areas of the UK (though they have been given a branch of the Louvre to try and make up for it).  Imagine fighting in such a landscape, using industrial landmarks such as the (now departed) Cuinchy brickstacks as an impromptu trench system.

Yet the best thing about the tours is not the selection of visits, or the high standard of guiding, or even the poetry.  It’s the chance to get together with people who are interested in the same things and whom we’ve come to regard, over the years, as friends.  In this year’s group, there were only three passengers who hadn’t been with us in previous years and I think they would agree that they had no difficulty fitting into the established core of enthusiasts.  This may be partly because we are a cross-section of Western Front Association members and SSF members, so everyone has an existing connection.  No longer do the military-minded group and the literary-minded group eye one another in a guarded fashion across the restaurant tables; those who were not truly interested in war poetry have long since fallen by the wayside.  

Now we are as one, and for this we can thank Vivien Whelpton and Clive Harris and the symbiotic relationship they have developed.  With encouragement from Viv, we do not hesitate to argue the case for our favourite poets.  So what if we disagree on the merits of E A Mackintosh's "verse", or whether Sassoon is better-looking than Aldington?  Healthy debate helps us learn from one another.  Even the redoubtable John Richardson was keen to admit that he has come round to admiring Jean Moorcroft Wilson as a biographer - and as usual, John's war poetry quiz was much anticipated and hotly contested.

Originally there was to be a series of only five War Poets tours, but Battle Honours has agreed to run at least two more – one specifically on Sassoon in 2017 and another on Owen in 2018.  Book yourself on one and don’t miss out on a treat that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.