Living History

At the recent Brenchley First World War Centenary Weekend, the SSF shared the marquee (left over from the authentic Flower Show which had taken place on the previous day) with a "living history" group - the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Living History Group, to be precise. That there are people willing to give their time to the recreation of history, purely for the love of it, is remarkable, and their knowledge of the period is second to none (if you exclude those who actually participated in that horrible war).

This paid off in terms of the number of visitors who wanted to view and handle the artefacts on display - including those of us who were supposed to be minding the SSF stall, which sadly attracted relatively few visitors. However, kudos to the village archive team, who put on a lovely display of material about the history of Brenchley and about Sassoon hmself in a room just off Gray's community cafe.

I don't remember Gray's being there last time I visited Brenchley village hall, and it's a fabulous facility for the village. They sold me one of the best cheese scones in living memory (and I consider myself something of an expert on that subject). Neither Brenchley nor Matfield has a great deal to offer in the way of shops or eating places nowadays. Matfield Cricket Club's favourite haunt, the Cricketer's Arms, has been closed for a year and there is no sign of it re-opening. Matfield's Cherry Tree Tea Rooms closed some years ago, and Matfield's community shop has also closed. "The Poet", though thoughtfully named, is an upmarket restaurant which doesn't tend to attract cricket teams.

You may think I have departed from the topic of living history, but I really haven't. The Brenchley archivists and the West Kent military history enthusiasts are all contributing to the understanding of our world as it was a hundred years ago. The photographic evidence survives of the self-contained rural community in which Siegfried grew up. When we were asked "Which biography of Sassoon should I read to find out about his life in this area?", we suggested reading The Weald of Youth instead. Some will argue that we don't need to "live" history. Some will say that the past is best forgotten.

Up to a point, I agree that we need to put the past behind us. I have been particularly disturbed by some of the coverage of the centenary of the Battle of Amiens, which has mentioned the defeat of the Germans as a matter for exultation as often as it has sounded regretful about the mass slaughter. I discovered recently that a neighbour's grandfather was a VC recipient; he keeps very quiet about this and was actually annoyed that one of his relatives had agreed to be interviewed by TV reporters. Even siblings can view the significance of history from quite different angles.

Siegfried Sassoon made his views on remembrance quite clear - as the lovely new carving at Brenchley says, "Look up and swear by the green of the spring that you will never forget." It was not because he wanted to remember. He saw the lists of names on the Menin Gate memorial as a cause for shame rather than a focus either for celebration or even for respectful mourning. On the other hand, if one did not remember, how could one hope to prevent a recurrence? The outbreak of another world war in 1939 filled him with despair.

Those of us who study history in the hope of not repeating the mistakes of the past are fully aware that we are wasting our time. Better, perhaps, to concentrate on understanding the past in order to see the present in context. So many of the racial and political tensions prevalent in today's world can be attributed to mere ignorance of the past.

Social Whirl

"Who?" I asked. "Who? How come I've never heard of him?"

At some time in the past I must have heard of him. A novelist and music critic who socialised with the Morrells (undoubtedly meeting Sassoon at Garsington), not to mention the Tennants, and lived in a stately home - of course I must have. But somehow Eddy Sackville-West (1901-1965) had made no impression.

He was, needless to say, related to Vita Sackville-West, the poet and novelist whose affairs with Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf are legendary, though they did not prevent her having a successful and enduring marriage to Harold Nicolson, who was also bisexual. Vita was unlucky enough to be born female, which meant that she could not inherit her family home at Knole, and she felt the loss keenly. No wonder Virginia Woolf chose her as the model for "Orlando".

Her first cousin, Eddy, was in line to inherit both the estate and the title of Baron Sackville, and was given a suite of rooms in anticipation of this. These have only relatively recently been opened to the public by the National Trust, which now owns and runs Knole. Several of these rooms have been redecorated and set out much as they were during Eddy's residence, though without the grand piano he kept in his music room. Eddy was more successful as a musician and music critic than he ever was as a writer of fiction.

Like his cousin, he had issues with his sexuality, but never overcame them enough to consider marriage. His long-standing lover was the literary critic Raymond Mortimer, whom he met while working for the New Statesman. Other close friends included Desmond Shawe-Taylor. He entertained a number of house guests at Knole, including Duncan Grant. A "life mask" of Eddy, along with a portrait of him by another friend, Graham Sutherland, can be seen in the tower rooms. The conductor Malcolm Sargent actually lived there for a time, after the Second World War, when his London home had been bombed. By then, Eddy had taken up residence near Wimborne in Dorset, sharing a household with Mortimer, Shawe-Taylor, and the painter Eardley Knollys.

On her visits to Eddy, his cousin Vita was surprisingly critical of his lifestyle, saying "I don't object to homosexuality, but I do hate decadence." Perhaps her true objection to him was that he was living in a house that should have been hers and did not appear to appreciate it as she did.

At Sissinghurst, which the Nicolsons later bought, you can see how Vita was trying to make up for the loss of Knole. A view of the house from the top of the "castle" gatehouse is surprisingly similar to looking down on Knole House from the tower, so much so that I initially labelled my holiday photos wrongly. Despite this, Vita and Harold eventually chose to settle down in a cottage in the gardens, where you can now see their living and sleeping arrangements, much as they were left when Harold died in 1968. Their son Nigel worked tirelessly to ensure that Sissinghurst, incorporating the gardens Vita designed, passed into the hands of the National Trust, and he was doubtless pleased with the results.

Siegfried's Last Stand

We are fast approaching the centenary of Siegfried Sassoon's final appearance on the Western Front. On 13th July 1918, he was wounded, as a result of which he was invalided home, once and for all, and never had to return to battle. Since it was a head wound, his thinking was affected for several days afterwards, so the feelings of relief (mixed with guilt) he would doubtless otherwise have experienced took some time to come to the fore.

He voices these feelings in a diary entry from hospital: "When I was hit it seemed an unspeakable thing to leave my men in the lurch, to go away into safety." As he was leaving the trench, he reassured the sergeant-major that he would be coming back. "You'll see me in three weeks," he told another officer as he attended the dressing-station. Determined not to return to Blighty, he wrote to friends saying he would remain in France until he was able to return to duty.

He had returned to the Western Front in May, after a period of service in Palestine, where there was little action apparently going on. At first bored, he had come to enjoy his time in the Middle East. He had not yet met T E Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia", who would become a firm friend. Thrown together with a medical officer, Captain Biggar, who was also a naturalist, he had begun bird-spotting, and regularly escaped into the woods and hills, partly in order to get away from the rest of the officers, many of whom he regarded with contempt because of their superior attitude. During this period he continued to receive letters from WIlfred Owen (whom he had met at Craiglockhart a year earlier), though, as Sam Gray showed in his recent talk at the joint London meeting, Siegfried was not very good at replying. Of the poems he wrote during that period, he commented, acknowledging his debt to Owen, "Unconsciously, I was getting nearer to Wilfred Owen's method of approach."

He had often thought about death, but perhaps not about the possibility of escaping death. "It seemed that across the Channel I had nothing to go back to..." He missed the company of his men and other officers such as his second-in-command Vivian da Sola Pinto, who had rapidly become a friend. Pinto too would survive the war. A visit from Rivers, while Sassoon was in the hospital at Lancaster Gate, put him in a better frame of mind.

Embarrassment must also have played a part in Sassoon's feelings. The wound that put him out of action was caused by his own recklessness. Returning from a patrol in no-man's-land, without his helmet, he was shot in the head by a sergeant from his own platoon, who mistook him for a German. It seems rather typical of Sassoon, from what we know of his earlier exploits, that he should have been so careless.

After a while, he began to imagine he could return to the Front as a disinterested commentator, but recognised this as an irrational desire. He hoped for a request to return as a representative of the Ministry of Information, but this idea was soon put paid to by Eddie Marsh, who told him that his reputation as a poet made it "unimaginable" that he might be employed by any government body. Eventually, in August, Wilfred was in London, and Siegfried was well enough to meet him for that "hot cloudless afternoon" (much like the weather as I write). They had tea at Osbert Sitwell's house in Swan Walk, Chelsea, and Sitwell took them to an impromptu concert at the home of the harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse, an important figure in the Early Music revival. Sassoon did not know that it would be the last time he would see Owen before he departed for France, still less that it would be their last meeting ever. He wrote to Owen from Coldstream, and received a reply while Owen was out of the line.

I do not know why he was so confident that he was never going back. Despite the failure of the German spring offensive and a general feeling that Britain was getting into a winning position, the war could easily have lasted another year or two. Yet somehow Sassoon felt assured that his war was over. In September he hoped to be offered a job with the Ministry of Munitions, but in the end he turned it down because of a feeling that it would be "inconsistent with my previous outburst against the prolongation of the War".

Yet he no longer felt as though he was still on active service, and had begun to feel "liberated and irresponsible". He would remain haunted by memories and regrets, especially after the Armistice in November, but for the moment he was happy, having encountered among his fellow convalescent officers another poet, Frank "Toronto" Prewett. The end of the war would eventually bring both joy and sorrow - the loss of his friend Wilfred Owen, and his replacement by two new friends, Thomas Hardy and T E Lawrence. There were many obstacles to be overcome before he could return to any semblance of normal life, and perhaps he never really would.

Jerome K Jerome, "a broken man"

If you find the title of this post surprising, you probably weren't at the recent Annual Conference of the Alliance of Literary Societies. After hearing Tony Gray's talk on the subject of Jerome K Jerome's life, I was certainly surprised, and wanted to know more. What could have happened to the author of Three Men in a Boat, one of English literature's funniest books, to cause him to lose his sense of humour?

Jerome Klapka Jerome (his middle name was apparently borrowed from the surname of a Hungarian military hero, in preference to his father's original surname of Clapp) was born in Walsall, and had a very successful literary career by the time of the First World War, when he was in his fifties. He was a supporter of British involvement in the war, and was eager to enlist. Being too old for active service, he travelled out to the Western Front as an ambulance driver for the French army. One of his uniforms is on display at his recently-restored birthplace.

In 1919, Jerome produced one of his last works, a novel called All Roads Lead to Calvary, clearly based on his own experiences even though the main protagonist is female. Critics have highlighted the stereotypical characters and situations, but, among other things, the themes treated in the book reveal similarities between Jerome and Sassoon in terms of their spiritual development and changing attitudes to war.

The Great War was not Jerome's first introduction to suffering. On the contrary, he had gone through some very hard times as a child and a young man, beginning when his father's bankruptcy resulted in the family having to leave their home. He subsequently found himself an orphaned clerical worker reliant on his older sisters for support, then an out-of-work actor, and finally a hack journalist going from one temporary job to another. So it might have been expected that the hardships to be endured during his military service would not have taken him unawares; yet it seems that, in late middle age, he was unable to adapt.

With the success of his writing had come personal happiness, as he met and married the divorcee Georgina "Ettie" Morris and acquired a stepdaughter. They later had a daughter of their own, Rowena. The family lived in Dresden, Germany, for two years, thus they had many German friends and acquaintances. At the time war broke out, they were living in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

After his participation in the conflict, Jerome wrote that he emerged from the experience "cured of any sneaking regard I may ever have had for war", something that was true of so many people (including Siegfried Sassoon). His long-serving secretary commented, "The old Jerome had gone. In his place was a stranger." His subsequent novels were quite a departure, and he even showed leanings towards socialism in his 1921 novel Anthony John. It was, of course, at around this time that Sassoon, under the influence of William Rivers, was considering standing for Parliament.

The death of his beloved stepdaughter Elsie in 1921, only in her thirties, was a devastating blow for Jerome, and his later years were spent in quiet domesticity until the final, fatal stroke he suffered in 1927. Relatively few people are aware of his later work. Like Siegfried, he could easily have said, "Most people think I died in 1919." Fortunately, both have thriving literary societies to foster the understanding of their work and ensure that their memory endures.

Around Birmingham with Francis Brett Young

I've just been to another AGM of the Alliance of Literary Societies. Twice in the past five years I've been on the organising end of this annual bash, and it is a great relief when someone else is responsible for it (though I was very pleased at the number of people who approached me to thank the SSF for last year's conference). This year's event rang the changes, however, since there were several societies involved in the "hosting", the venue having been changed when the host society originally designated for 2018 dropped out of contention.

Birmingham is where many of the ALS's current committee are based, as well as being home to many notable authors who have literary societies of their own. Several of these were the subject of talks at the conference, notably A E Housman, J R R Tolkien and Jerome K Jerome. These are all household names, but how many people today are familiar with the works of Francis Brett Young?

Young, born in suburban Halesowen in 1884 and thus a close contemporary of Siegfried Sassoon, was something of a polymath, who wrote music in addition to plays, novels and poetry, all the while working as a physician - at least until 1918 when he was forced to discontinue his practice after being discharged from the Medical Corps, having become seriously ill during his two years' service in East Africa. He dealt with this period in a memoir called Marching on Tanga. His experiences also found their way into some of his novels, the best known of which is probably My Brother Jonathan, in which a public-spirited doctor comes into conflict with local industrialists and loses his brother in the First World War.

Like many novelists, Francis Brett Young based most of his fiction in locations he knew, particularly the city of Birmingham, which he renamed "North Bromwich". Michael Hall, a representative of the Francis Brett Young Society, gave a very lively talk during the conference, identifying and describing the places and buildings that appear in Young's novels, mostly under invented names - or rather, names that give clues to the identity of the locations that lurk beneath, such as "Dulston" (Dudley) and "Halesby" (Halesowen). This practice was followed by many writers, notably Thomas Hardy, but also Siegfried Sassoon, who called Lamberhurst "Amblehurst" and Brenchley "Butley", as well as tinkering with the names of his acquaintances in an effort to avoid being identified as the author of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and its sequels.

Young's attachment to the region where he had been born is remarkable in one who spent so much of his life travelling, but it was the backdrop to his early life, right up to his graduation from the University of Birmingham in the mid-1900s. He first plied his trade as a physician on a sea voyage to the Far East and, following his marriage to a singer, Jessie Hankinson, he settled in Devon. After his service in Africa, he and Jessie went to live in Capri for the sake of his health, and on their eventual return to Britain they lived in the Lake District and Cornwall, as well as Worcestershire. In the aftermath of the Second World War, his health again deteriorated and they moved permanently to South Africa, where he died in 1954.

Following the talk, when it was announced that some members of the Brett Young family were present, and had brought along unwanted copies of several of the novels, there was a veritable stampede to acquire this unexpected freebie. This was a bonus for those of us who are used to having our senses awakened at ALS meetings by new knowledge of an author previously unknown to us but don't always get around to acquiring copies of the recommended titles.

Bards and other Revolutionaries

The other evening I went to a literary event at my local library that was truly entertaining as well as educational. It was the official launch of the English-language version of a historical novel about Iolo Morganwg, the Welsh version having been published last autumn. I can almost hear the question mark in the minds of many readers - "Iolo? Is that the guy off Springwatch?" Try again. Some of you will perhaps be thinking that the name sounds like that of a medieval Welsh prince, or maybe one of those medieval bards.

If you are thinking the latter, you are not so far off the mark, except for the fact that Iolo Morganwg lived from 1747 to 1826 and his real name was plain old Edward Williams. He did write poetry, but many of the "medieval" manuscripts he claimed to have discovered were clever forgeries. The main difference between him and Thomas Chatterton (apart from Chatterton having died at 17 and Iolo at 79) is that Iolo was more versatile. Rather like Tolkien, Iolo invented his own alphabet, which he claimed had been used by the druids of Roman Britain. For centuries, since his deception was discovered by a closer inspection of the papers he left behind, his popular image has been that of a charlatan, and it is only in recent decades that his reputation as an antiquarian and libertarian thinker has been restored. Possibly his greatest achievement, the revival of the medieval arts festival known as an "eisteddfod", complete with new traditions such as the Gorsedd of Bards, is now looked on by many as the action of a great patriot.

It seems that there may have been some excuse for his conduct. Iolo was addicted to laudanum, which he used to counteract the effects of the asthma from which he suffered and which was aggravated by his day-to-day work as a stonemason. It has been suggested that at times he had difficulty in separating fantasy from reality. Since many modern musicians and artists attribute their creativity to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, it seems unfair to criticise a man who lived two hundred years ago for doing the same thing, especially when much, if not most, of his output was original and much of his historical research was of a perfectly respectable standard.

Iolo is very much in vogue these days, particularly in Cowbridge (by coincidence, the postal address of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship), where he once ran a bookshop. Don't get excited; the bookshop isn't there any more, the building was demolished many years ago, and the site is now occupied by a Costa Coffee outlet. The local authority has, however, recognised the tourist potential of the association with Iolo, creating a "Iolo Morganwg circular walk" and erecting numerous plaques and memorials in his honour, Other parts of the UK are not so keen: in London, residents of the Primrose Hill area recently opposed a memorial to the eisteddfod he held there in 1792, on the grounds that he was a "criminal". The memorial was nevertheless allowed to stay.

By now you will be wondering whether there is any link with Siegfried Sassoon. Well, there isn't. And yet... While I was out walking on Stalling Down yesterday morning, I came across the stone that commemorates the Gorsedd ceremony held on that spot by Iolo and some like-minded companions in 1795. Halfway up the hill they were met by a local magistrate, who remonstrated with them for breaking the law on illegal gatherings; Iolo pointed out that their numbers were nowhere near the upper limit, whereas the magistrate, by bringing along a large contingent of the Glamorgan Volunteers and other associates, was himself in danger of exceeding the allowed number.

Look at what was happening at the time Iolo Morganwg lived. He sometimes called himself "The Bard of Liberty", and was nicknamed by others "the little republican bard", because he had shown sympathy with the revolutionaries of France and the United States. Indeed, he was once hauled before a tribunal in London on suspicion of treasonous activities. One story says that he was asked by a customer in his bookshop for a copy of The Rights of Man, the book by Thomas Paine that got its author convicted of seditious libel. Iolo responded by selling the man a copy of The Bible, saying, "You will find in that book the best and dearest rights of man."

Iolo's own pacifist beliefs are witnessed by the wording of the eisteddfod ceremonies he invented. "Y gwir yn erbyn y byd", says the Archdruid when proclaiming the new bard (the best-known winner of the title being Hedd Wyn in 1917). "The truth against the world" is the translation of this phrase. The "Sword of Peace" is partially unsheathed as the Archdruid three times asks for the assent of the crowd. "A oes heddwch?" (literally, "Is there peace?") Rarely is there a voice raised against the audience's shout of "Heddwch!" although it did happen once, as I recall - in 1976, when Dic Jones (generally regarded as one of the greatest of Welsh-language poets) was disqualified over a conflict of interest and the prize instead given to Alan Llwyd, whose subsequent reputation among Welsh-language writers is virtually unsurpassed. Dic Jones later himself became Archdruid and was no doubt grateful that no comparable controversy occurred during his tenure.

Fixing the comet Owen

At last weekend's joint meeting of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship and Wilfred Owen Association, Azucena Keatley gave us some interesting insights into the psychology of both Owen and Sassoon, with particular reference to Owen's relationship with his parents. Sassoon, it seems, may well have been a rival to Tom Owen in terms of a father figure.

From Sassoon's point of view, the relationship was certainly of a paternal nature. He had no father of his own, nor did he foresee any likelihood of ever having a son - much as he longed for one. The First World War gave him the opportunity to offer comfort and guidance to younger, less experienced men who must greatly have appreciated his presence when they were in physical and emotional need. Siegfried seemed to know what was required, possibly because it was what had been lacking in his own early life.

So it is hardly surprising, as Dr Keatley pointed out, that the relationship between Sassoon and Owen, although coloured by what appear to be Owen's romantic attachment to his older friend (at least, as expressed in his letters to Sassoon), should have developed from one of mentor and pupil into one that more strongly resembled that of father and son. They were protective of one another, but in different ways. Owen was dismayed to hear of Sassoon's wound in 1918 because he feared the loss of someone he turned to for emotional support; Sassoon feared Owen's return to the Western Front because he could not bear the thought of Owen's creative promise being lost to posterity.

Was that all it was? It has not gone unnoticed, particularly by Owen aficionados, that Sassoon's attitude to Owen, like that of Robert Graves, was extremely condescending. Referring to him as "little Owen" and "my little friend" (as he later did with other friends, such as Edmund Blunden), he talks of him as a poet of some promise but by no means a genius. Yet Owen says that "you have fixed my life". By this, I believe, he means that Sassoon's guidance had given the "mad comet" a purpose and a goal that enabled him to orbit in a disciplined way. And when he says, "I shall swing out soon, a dark star", he is intimating that, though he may remain in Sassoon's shadow, he will make a mark as his own man, with his own poetic style. He needed only a little polishing. Having received it, he is content to go his own way, recognising that their intimacy, fostered by wartime experiences, would not last forever. In this, he was more perceptive than Sassoon.

Sam Gray, who also spoke at the meeting, gave a summary of the correspondence (as far as it is known) that passed between Owen and Sassoon after their departure from Craiglockhart in 1917, noting the paucity of letters from Sassoon in contrast to Owen's frequent missives. Time and again an eager Owen berates his friend for not replying, hoping that the letters have gone missing rather than not having been written in the first place. The reality seems to be that Sassoon had other things on his mind. There were so many others to be written to: Robbie Ross, Ottoline Morrell, Robert Graves and Robert Nichols, to name but a few.

Owen was one of Sassoon's most faithful correspondents, but there was no gratitude for this from the recipient. It was to Nichols that Siegfried wrote: "Write again, write again. I'm not dead yet. I've got weeks and weeks to live," and to Nichols that he sent the manuscript of "I Stood with the Dead". Nichols was already a well-known poet, perceived to have a bright future ahead of him; Owen was unknown and Sassoon would not have dreamed of asking his advice. He failed to foresee that Owen's work (thanks partly to his own efforts in getting the collected poems published in 1920) would go on to inspire generations, while Nichols's output would almost sink without trace.

At times, I have no doubt, it was a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Sassoon had other fish to fry, and other places to go. After recovering from the head wound that put him out of the war for good, he was lunching with Ross and Arnold Bennett at the Reform Club, having tea with Lady Ottoline and dinner with Edward Marsh, even exchanging views with Winston Churchill. In early November 1918, he was having that famous first encounter with T E Lawrence and going down to Max Gate to visit Thomas and Florence Hardy for the first time, not to mention congratulating himself on the third impression of his collection Counter-Attack.

Owen, of course, did not have a great deal of time for writing after he returned to France in August. The sad truth was that Sassoon did not miss his letters partly because he knew what the Western Front was like, but also because he valued them less than the letters from some of the people he had known longer. He admitted later that he was fearful, and did not want to hear the inevitable news of his young friend's death. Owen shared his last days of life through his correspondence with his mother, which survives. He did not have much time to regret the absence of his mentor and was never obliged to recognise that their relationship may have meant far less to Sassoon than it did to him.