Trees of Remembrance

I will confess that the idea of a "National Memorial Arboretum" seems rather a bizarre one.  Certainly there is a trend, and not really a new one, for people to plant trees in memory of loved ones. Siegfried Sassoon's mother, Theresa, notably planted one on the village green at Matfield to commemorate the end of the First World War, although the one that is to be found on the spot now is not the one she planted; that blew down in the great "hurricane" of 1987.  Nevertheless, the idea of a 150-acre site full of trees and other types of memorial is not one that would ever have occurred to me.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I visited the Arboretum last week, but I was pleasantly surprised. Admittedly the new visitor centre is mostly still under wraps, as is the main armed forces memorial, erected in 2007 and dedicated by Dr Rowan Williams, in his capacity as Archbishop of Canterbury.   It takes the form of a stone circle and carries the names of servicemen and women who have died in the years since World War II, many thousands of them, like a smaller version of the Thiepval memorial, or the Menin Gate of which Siegfried was so critical.  The main difference is that almost all of those named have known graves.  Their family has a private memorial; the nation has a public one.

Dr Williams is known as a man of peace, but clearly does not shrink from open admiration of the armed forces. "All the service and skill that keeps us secure may be invisible a lot of the time," he said at the opening ceremony, "but if we are not to be dishonest, shallow and unreal, we need to make the invisible visible once in a while."  There was a time - at the height of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, perhaps - when such recognition was hard to come by in the UK.  The Falklands conflict resulted in a certain thawing of public relations, but the army remained something you really didn't want your son to join.

What finally changed the atmosphere in Britain, I believe, was the peacekeeping activities of UN troops in countries like Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Rwanda and El Salvador. In 1988 the UN peacekeeping forces received the Nobel Peace Prize, an accolade that seems well-deserved even if their subsequent efforts were not always successful.  Meanwhile, the global situation suggested that the assault on Iraq in the First Gulf War was justified by the undisciplined conduct of the country's leader, and a decade later, the events of 9/11 left every country in the West looking over its shoulder.

What was more, acting with allies in the cause of world peace was starting to seem more like something you would want your son, or even your daughter, to be involved in.  It wasn't about being "Top Nation" any more (to quote Sellar and Yeatman); it was about showing how civilised you were by comparison with other countries.  If that sounds as though I'm being critical of the soldiers who went to Afghanistan, I'm not, but, like Siegfried, I'm not so sure about the politicians.

Memorial to the Land Girls and Lumber Jills

If it's peace we prize, and peace is the reason we now respect members of the armed forces, surely we should be giving some consideration to others who give their lives to help others: the fire service, the police, the lifeboat crews?  Many of these are volunteers and are not even paid for their service.  And it is here that you will find them, those who "also served".  It's a curious mixture really, and I suppose that its very randomness is, and will continue to be, an attraction, which is why there were plenty of visitors around on a cold Monday in March, and that number will undoubtedly grow.  A lot of them will be older people who actually remember a world war, but there will be the school parties and the older students and people like ourselves, who simply look on, if not with outright admiration, then at least with respect.

The artistry and workmanship that has gone into these memorials is also something to be appreciated. They come in all shapes and sizes, from traditional monuments relocated from closed-down public buildings to modern, brightly-coloured structures.  I would not be myself if I didn't comment on the fact that a couple of the carefully engraved stones and plaques suffered from the extraneou's apostroph'e syndrome - what a pity, when so much money has been spent on them, that no one took the trouble to check that the commemorative message was written correctly - spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar, so to speak - but I daresay the majority of visitors have not even noticed.

All in all, a recommendation for a visit.  Allow yourself plenty of time to walk around, or, if your mobility is limited, take the tour by "road train" with a running commentary from a British Legion volunteer.  I think it is worth it.

A Game of Statues

There was a bit of a fuss recently about a statue.  Not the first such fuss, of course.  Most of us can recall incidents of a similar nature.  Usually the controversy is about one of two things: either people don't like the statue itself, or they don't like the subject of the statue.

The row I have just heard about is over a statue of Cecil Rhodes.  I think most people in Britain today - and of course in South Africa - are of the opinion that he really wasn't a very nice man.  He may have left a fortune that now enables overseas scholars to come and study at Oxford University (former US president Bill Clinton being possibly the best-known beneficiary), but that doesn't make up for his treatment of the native people in South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe, whom he drove from their lands to further his own business interests.  In human terms, his belief in his own racial superiority was on a par with Hitler's.

We all recognise that Rhodes was a product of his time.  The question is, does his generous bequest to educational funding make up for his unpleasant politics?  Initially, Rhodes Scholarships were reserved for white males; only in the last decade of the twentieth century did they become truly inclusive.  The first protests by students against commemoration of Cecil Rhodes took place when the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement was created in 2014 to seek the removal of a statue erected at the University of Cape Town in 1934.  The movement spread to Oxford where, late last year, the Oriel College authorities were urged to remove a bronze statue of Rhodes from the façade of the Rhodes Building which fronts onto the High Street. They have declined to do so (perhaps hoping that rebellious undergraduates might do the job for them?)

In a public statement, Oriel College said that they would ensure that "acknowledgement of the historical fact of Rhodes's bequest to the College does not suggest celebration of his unacceptable views and actions".  That is as far as they are prepared to go and, for the most part, commentators seem to consider their decision to be the right one.  The great Michael Wood, whose BBC History column is always worth reading, suggests that a statue of an African leader might be put alongside that of Rhodes, to balance things out.

I'm not sure about it.  I was an undergraduate at Oxford for three years and have visited the city many times since.  I must have walked past Rhodes' statue hundreds of times without ever noticing it was there.  So what would be so terrible about removing it?  As yet, I haven't succeeding in finding out the identity of the sculptor, but it doesn't appear to be a great work of art.

Hamo Sassoon's statue of Rhodes in Kimberley

I would feel differently, though, if it turned out that the sculptor was, for example, Sir Hamo Thornycroft, Siegfried Sassoon's uncle, or one of Siegfried's grandparents.  On checking my facts, I discovered that Hamo did indeed create a statue of Cecil Rhodes - an equestrian statue at Kimberley in South Africa, unveiled in 1907.  An early study is held by the Tate Gallery.  Would I want this statue taken down?  No, not really.  (Luckily, the "Rhodes Must Fall" campaigners don't yet seem to have their eye on it.) Would I object if all such statues of Rhodes were removed from their pedestals and placed in museums where their context could be more clearly shown?  No, I wouldn't.  But I wonder, which museum would want them?

Johnny Conchie

When I was perhaps about twelve, I tried to describe to my grandmother a man I kept seeing in her street, who always smiled and said hello to me.  "Oh, that's Johnny Conchie," she eventually said, and laughed.  She told me that it wasn't his real name, but his nickname, because he had been a conscientious objector during the war.  I was old enough to understand that she meant the First World War, but I had never heard of a conscientious objector before.  It was explained to me that he had refused to fight during the war, "because he thought it was wrong".

So, in the mid-1960s, a man in his seventies was known by a nickname he had picked up about fifty years earlier.  My grandparents knew him well and appeared to think nothing of this.  They clearly felt no resentment against him for it.  

Perhaps they were not a typical family.  My grandfather just missed the Western Front, after sitting for several hours on a train in Pembrokeshire only to be returned to his training barracks because the Armistice was about to be signed. His four brothers were too young to be called up; his father was too old.  My grandmother's older brothers were the right age, but chose the navy and survived. So perhaps, unlike some, they had nothing to resent Johnny Conchie for.

The motives for Johnny Conchie's action, or inaction if you prefer, were never known to me.  Being from an industrial town in South Wales, he could well have been a socialist, or very religious, or both.  My family even seemed unsure what the punishment for his rebellion against authority had been; there was a vague idea that he had been to prison.

Contrary to the classification many give him, Siegfried Sassoon was not a conscientious objector, or at least not in the usual sense. He went willingly to war in 1914 and willingly back to war in 1917. Between those times, he did indeed suffer a crisis of conscience, but it was not caused by a religious experience, nor - I think - by a specific experience of any kind; it was more a reflection of the mental anguish brought about by the sight of so much human suffering and the deaths of so many of his friends and comrades.  Who could have blamed him if he had lost touch with reality as a result of such an environment?

Yet Siegfried, though suffering from hallucinations and having difficulty with civilian life, had not lost touch with his sense of what mattered.  It was being away from the war, in the comfort of convalescent accommodation, that enabled him to look more dispassionately at his situation and realise that, in order to be true to his dead comrades, he had to be true to himself.  I have always argued, and will continue to argue, that he acted of his own accord, that he was not bamboozled by the cleverness of Bertrand Russell or anyone else into doing their political dirty work for them. Seeing that Sassoon was desperate to do something constructive to help other soldiers, they showed him some possibilities that he might not have come up with by himself.  Although, after a few months in "Dottyville", he may have felt as though it had all been a waste of time, he never blamed others for encouraging him to make his protest.

It is true that Sassoon, had he merely been deemed a traitor rather than being branded as mentally ill, might have come before a court-martial and been shot if convicted, but that was never a likely outcome for one who had already served with distinction at the Western Front. In the First World War, the real conscientious objectors suffered punishments that were mostly less severe than those that could be imposed by a court-martial - which may be considered ironic.  If their consciences allowed them, they might be able to take up a non-combatant role, such as stretcher-bearer or transport duties. Some of the hard-liners, like the "Richmond Sixteen", had their death sentences commuted to penal servitude and did not complete their sentences until after the war.  Altogether, about eighty conscientious objectors died in the course of their imprisonment, in some cases because of their harsh treatment.

Deserters, on the other hand, or any serviceman convicted of cowardice, could be executed.  It was important, the authorities felt, to make an example of them, but the death sentence was carried out in only 10% of cases - around 300 men in all during the First World War.  That is another story, for another time.

Together

A recent enquiry came out of the blue, asking who was the friend referred to by Siegfried Sassoon in his poem "Together". I have to confess that I did not know the answer, though the wording of the poem suggested one of Siegfried’s hunting friends. The enquiry was passed on to more knowledgeable souls, who told me that the answer was probably Stephen Gordon Harbord, portrayed in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man under the name of Stephen Colwood. Those of you who came on the 2014 WFA Poetry tour may recall visiting Harbord’s grave at Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery near Ypres; he was killed in 1917.

Unlike his alter ego, Stephen Colwood, Gordon Harbord was not a schoolmate of Siegfried’s.  He went to Winchester, while Sassoon was at Marlborough; they first met around 1908. Harbord’s elder brother, Kenneth, four years Gordon’s senior, was a contemporary of Sassoon’s at Marlborough.  Kenneth went into the Royal Flying Corps and was one of the many servicemen who convalesced at Highclere Castle, “the real Downton Abbey”, under the patronage of Lady Almina Herbert.  (Since the surname “Harbord” is believed to have originated as a corruption of “Herbert”, this gives rise to further interesting possibilities.)

Almina’s husband, the Earl of Carnarvon (the very same treasure-hunter who later died of “Tutankhamen’s Curse”), became friendly with Kenneth during his convalescence, through their shared interest in flying machines.  Another of Gordon's brothers was Arthur Macdonald Harbord, who rose to the rank of major and married a daughter of Lord Louth, whilst Kenneth married a daughter of Sir William Goulding, Bt.

Colwood Park in Bolney, West Sussex, was the Harbords’ family home, hence Siegfried’s choice of this fictional surname for his late friend.  Like Stephen Colwood's father, Harbord senior was a clergyman, the Rev Harry Harbord, rector of East Hoathly.  I have been unable to establish any link between Gordon’s father and Australia’s legendary “bush poet”, Harry Harbord “Breaker” Morant; in the latter case, Harbord appears to have been an assumed name, possibly indicating an illegitimate line of descent – but I somehow doubt that the Harbords of Colwood Park were involved, and Morant seems to have been born in Devon.  The Rev Harbord was a follower of the Southdown Hunt, hence his acquaintance with the horse and hound loving Sassoon.  Gordon was a graduate and had ambitions to become an engineer. The firm friendship that grew between him and Siegfried was likened by the latter to a fraternal relationship; at times Siegfried felt closer to him than to his own brothers. Thus the death of the fictional Stephen Colwood would stand in place of the death of Siegfried's brother Hamo, George Sherston being an only child.

Gordon Harbord was in the Royal Field Artillery, which might initially sound safer than the trenches but in fact was equally dangerous as the enemy would naturally try to take out the guns and their crews and commanders who were doing all the damage to their forces.  Gordon was killed on 14 August 1917 while supervising the removal of guns from one position to another, in preparation for an assault on Passchendaele Ridge.  Not long before, he had won the Military Cross and been promoted to Captain.

Gordon's younger brother Geoffrey, who was also a friend of Siegfried's, had read the poems in "Counter-Attack" and written that he pitied Siegfried because he clearly felt the "horrors and bloodiness of it all more than I do".  Yet shortly before Gordon's death, Geoffrey (who was also in the Artillery), wrote to say how worried he was about Gordon because of his posting to Ypres, and commented that he wished to God it were all over. A few weeks later, after Gordon's death, he wrote that "you were easily his best friend".    

It seems to me that we don't pay enough attention to Siegfried's friendship with Gordon Harbord, possibly because it was a friendship formed through sporting activities and thus seems somehow less important than the more cerebral friendships with Graves, Owen, Hardy and the like.  However, Siegfried was fond enough of Gordon to write at least three poems about him, one being among my favourites.  "Idyll" is not a war poem, but Siegfried produced it in early 1918, while stationed in Ireland.  In 2014, a version in his own handwriting was sold at Bonham's auction rooms for £1,875. I wonder who bought it?

Has the British Museum lost its charm?

Ira Gershwin was only joking when he wrote the lyrics for “A Foggy Day in London Town” in 1937.  The Clean Air Act of 1956 gradually got rid of most of the pea-soup fogs but, thankfully, the museum remains.  Does it, however, retain its charm?  After a visit to The Celts exhibition (which ran until the end of January), I was somewhat disenchanted. 

I’ve been to several major exhibitions at the museum in recent years and had the same experience each time: missing some of the exhibits because of the random layout and having to wait ages to see the most popular ones because there is no control or even advice on how to approach them.  Some people come from the left, others from the right, still more from behind.  If you are British (i.e. not pushy) and short, you don’t have much chance of getting there within a reasonable time.  And some people are very slow readers…

“The Celts” was a particularly disappointing exhibition, beginning with the false premise that there is no connection whatsoever between the Celtic fringes of Britain and France and the “keltoi” identified by the ancient Greeks.  The curators seem to think that the Celts in Wales and the rest of mainland Britain did not convert to Christianity until the Romans had left and stopped imposing Christianity on them, which would be an extremely odd thing for them to have done at that point.  A disproportionate amount of space and attention is given to the Celtic revival – presumably because they ran out of prehistoric exhibits - with little explanation of the development and meaning of modern traditions; druidry, apparently, is a completely new invention; no mention, as far as I could see, of Suetonius Paulinus's campaign to root them out of Anglesey.

In case you haven't guessed by now, this is just a personal rant. If you are wondering what the exhibition has to do with Sassoon, any connections are very tenuous.  Let’s start with the BM itself.  It was founded in 1753.  It is a 15-minute walk from Raymond Buildings, Siegfried’s first London lodgings, and he certainly visited it.  In 1933 he even gave the museum £100 to assist in the purchase of some manuscripts of Wilfred Owen’s work.  The British Library was of course part of the museum then; in fact, the present exhibition area is located in the famous former reading room, once a gathering-place for the likes of Shaw, Wilde and Lenin.

Between 1950 and 1959, the Director of the BM was Sir Thomas Kendrick, whose daughter Frances was a close friend of the novelist Barbara Pym (regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will know of my interest in Pym).  Only recently did researches into the Pym archive reveal that Barbara herself had a long-running personal relationship with Sir Thomas, the exact nature of which remains unknown.  Sir Thomas Kendrick had served in the First World War, in the course of which he attained the rank of captain.   Unknown to me when I started writing this, his published works included a book on the history of Druidism.  Another of his interests was Victorian art, and his notable collaborators in this field included the poet John Betjeman, who was too young to have served in the first war but famously spied for the British government when working in Dublin during the Second World War.  Unlike the rampantly heterosexual Kendrick, Betjeman is believed to have had homosexual tendencies although, like Siegfried, he was attracted to members of the opposite sex, was married and had children.  

Whether Siegfried ever met Thomas Kendrick I have no idea, but he certainly knew Betjeman. The latter favourably reviewed Sassoon’s one full-length foray into biography, Meredith. The Cambridge Sassoon archive contains a letter Betjeman wrote him in 1957, after news of his conversion to Catholicism became public.  When the two men met at Alan Lascelles’ house in 1960, Betjeman declared, “I am nothing. You are a great poet.”

What about Sassoon’s Celtic connections? Are there any? Admittedly we are on slightly shakier ground with this. One cannot really count his association with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. However, in view of the concentration on the Celtic "revival" in the exhibition, it seems fair to mention W B Yeats, whom Sassoon knew well from visits to Garsington. Yeats was one of the prime movers in the revival also known as the “Celtic Twilight” movement, which thrived in the late 19^thand early 20^th century and in which Wilfred Owen also dabbled. Edinburgh, at the time Sassoon and Owen resided there, was a hotbed of the revival, led by figures like Patrick Geddes (whose son Alasdair was killed in action in 1917) and the artist Anna Traquair, whose work can be seen all over the city.

We are drawing further away from my ostensible subject and I have obviously run out of useful things to say.  But who knows what unexpected connections may turn up at some future date?

Who was Harry Ransom?

Does the name sound familiar?  If you are a Sassoon aficionado, it will, though you may not know anything about the man who bore the name.  If you are not a Sassoon enthusiast, the chances are you have never heard of him at all.  He was not a celebrity or even a significant historical figure.

Ransom, who died in 1976, taught English and was an administrator, and later president, of the University of Texas at Austin.  In 1957, he founded the Humanities Research Centre at the university.  He wanted to make it a focal point for one of the best collections of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, America's equivalent of the Bibliotheque Nationale.   Specifically, he wanted it to be a research centre, not just a library.  Long before he acquired the Sassoon archive now held there, he had amassed a huge collection of English and American literary history, including significant content by British and Irish writers such as D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw.

When Ransom left his post as director in 1961, his successors continued to expand the collection, which subsequently moved to a new building of a more suitable size, designed by architects selected by Ransom himself.  Its present staff refer to it as a "place of discovery" and to Ransom himself as "a visionary".  The more I found out about it, the more I have come to realise that it is not merely a library but a gallery, a museum, a conservation centre and much more besides.

Siegfried Sassoon features prominently in the collection, along with other First World War poets. The HRC's holdings include letters to or from Max Beerbohm, Edmund Blunden, Sydney Cockerell, Henry Head, H M Tomlinson, Philip Gosse (junior), and other illustrious names from Sassoon’s social circle.  In Spring 2014, the centre hosted a special exhibition entitled (perhaps somewhat unoriginally) "The World at War 1914-1918". One of the organisers of the exhibition was Dr Jean Cannon, a member of the SSF whom I was lucky enough to meet at the 2014 conference on British First World War Poetry at Wadham College, Oxford.

A review of the exhibition in the New York Times (those who are interested can read the full review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/arts/design/viewing-world-war-i-through-the-prism-of-the-personal.html ) included Sassoon's original 1917 manuscript of "The General" (complete with drawing), and 469 other artefacts, and aimed to focus on individual experience, in the form of letters, diaries, photographs, posters, sketches and other items from the Harry Ransom Centre's collection. (It rather amused me to note that the NYT published an apology a week later for misspelling the word "Dulce" in the title of Wilfred Owen's famous poem as "Dolce".)

The next important visitor to the Harry Ransom Centre will be our own Vivien Whelpton, who will be there in April to research the second volume of her biography of Richard Aldington, to be published by Lutterworth.  I am looking forward immensely to hearing Viv talk about her experiences in Texas.  In the meantime, to see a fascinating short film about the Harry Ransom Centre, take this link: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2014/discovery/

Bringing Sassoon to Texas

One of our members has kindly sent me a present.  It’s a document I’d seen before but never had much time to study, as I didn’t have my own copy.  It is the catalogue of an exhibition that took place at The University of Texas at Austin in 1969, only two years after Siegfried Sassoon’s death.  You may be aware that this university holds an almost unparalleled collection of original Sassoon material, including diaries, letters, manuscripts and valuable first editions of some of his publications.

Looking through a catalogue like this has the serendipitous effect of bringing to mind many different aspects of Sassoon the man: his humour, his artistry, his courage and his sensitivity.  I was eleven when he died, and it is good to know that he was appreciated in his lifetime and so soon afterwards; the introduction to the catalogue is written by none other than his old friend Edmund Blunden, who himself would die five years later, having far exceeded Sassoon in academic achievement but never quite equalled him in fame or literary merit. Nowadays Blunden is becoming more appreciated, but Sassoon’s posthumous reputation has eclipsed all except Wilfred Owen among the war poets, his conduct during the First World War now being seen as an example to others in an increasingly violent international political climate.  Younger people are holding up Sassoon as an icon of our times and attempting to emulate him, in their writing and in their lives.

Blunden describes Sassoon as “more of a book-hunter than a fox-hunter” and comments on the religious aspect of his poetry, which sadly continues to be much ignored by other critics. It is clear even from this short introduction that Blunden understood Sassoon’s character better than almost anybody (he did after all arrange his first contact with Dennis Silk). He focuses on Sassoon’s originality as a person and as a writer, which I think is key to the continued popularity of his work.  To have had Siegfried as a friend, a privilege never granted to most of us who are alive today, would have been to experience his character in full, not only in person but in the shape of letters such as that written to Roderick Meiklejohn in 1917, a few days after making his Soldier's Declaration: “I saw the authorities here today, &, as I expected -- coals of fire were heaped on my rebellious head ... I have gone too far to withdraw, even if I had the faintest desire to do so." Or this one, to Blunden in 1944 after hearing of the death of their mutual friend Rex Whistler, killed in action aged 39: "I suffered a few minutes of bombed out feeling -- it really made me shake my fist at the war. But I have learnt to control such experiences..."

It is just as well he had, because, at the time of Siegfried Sassoon's death, the world was in the throes of a conflict that would make a lasting impact on the international political scene as well as on the culture of many nations.  Noam Chomsky's important essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", had been published earlier in 1967, and Sassoon would certainly have been aware of it, since it had been published as a supplement to the New York Times Review of Books.  In it, Chomsky referred back to a quotation from the critic and philosopher Dwight  Macdonald: "Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster."  Surely Sassoon was one such, but (to the best of my knowledge) he did not condemn.

By the time the exhibition was put on, other events had stirred up even greater opposition to the Vietnam War, including film of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head.  The protests were spreading, and on 15 October 1969, while the Sassoon exhibition was running,  coordinated demonstrations were taking place throughout the USA.  The Kent State shootings and the "napalm girl" were yet to come.

I wonder how much influence reaction to the Vietnam War had on public perceptions of Sassoon, and whether the coincidence of his death during this period had something to do with the subsequent growth in his popularity.  I wonder, in fact, whether this is one of the reasons a university in Texas was keen to acquire a collection relating to Sassoon and his work.  Perhaps a subject for further investigation...