A Simpleton's Progress

There is a gap in Siegfried Sassoon's published diaries between 1918 and 1920, but of course we know what he was doing during that period. Jean Moorcroft Wilson's biography is always my first port of call when I want to find out details of Siegfried's activities at a specific time, such as February 1919, when he was beginning to fall out of love with Gabriel Atkin and was wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his own life. His respected mentor, W H R Rivers, had suggested that he study political economy, but Sassoon's character was not apt to submit itself to the self-discipline of a course of "independent study" at Oxford, the location he had chosen largely because of the proximity of his friends, Robert Graves, Frank Prewett and Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Although the sojourn in Oxford was fleeting, it introduced him to another literary circle, for the nearby village of Boars Hill was already becoming known as "Parnassus" because of the number of poets who had settled there. Since he was already confused about his own political views, his attempt at the academic study of politics and philosophy was almost doomed to failure, despite his best efforts. Far more interesting to him were the individuals he met in and around the city. The arrival of Robert Graves to take up the undergraduate place he had been obliged to forego when he joined the armed forces was eagerly anticipated, despite the fact that Graves had married Nancy Nicholson the previous year, much against Sassoon's wishes. By the time Graves arrived, the couple were the parents of a daughter.

Early in February, Sassoon set off to visit one of the most notable members of the Boars Hill community, John Masefield, who had been a hospital orderly in France and now spent his spare time keeping bees, goats and chickens. Masefield had his own theatre, designed for him by local architect Thomas Rayson, for which both Graves and Sassoon were encouraged to write plays, though it does not appear they ever did. The Graves family soon settled near Masefield.

Sassoon's other Oxford friend, Prewett, introduced him to the young William Walton, who had come up to Christ Church as an undergraduate at the unprecedentedly early age of sixteen but would be sent down in 1920. Sassoon's love of music is well known, and he would become a patron of Walton, who dedicated a later piece to him. He in turn introduced Walton to the Sitwell brothers, already friends of Sassoon's, and they returned the favour by introducing Sassoon to the novelist Ronald Firbank, who was more or less the same age but behaved so eccentrically that even the Sitwells - never noted for their conventionality - were nonplussed. Beverley Nichols, a fellow undergraduate of Sacheverell Sitwell, was twelve years Sassoon's junior, but they formed a brief relationship based on mutual attraction. Jean Moorcroft Wilson astutely points out that Sassoon's probable one-night-stand with Nichols was an indication of his increasing acceptance of his own sexuality.

Although Sassoon was becoming concerned that his poetic inspiration was drying up, one of his most famous poems, "Aftermath", comes from this period; this on its own may be considered to have made his stay in Oxford worth while. In mid-March, only a few days after writing it, he was offered a job by the Daily Herald, and this caused him to take the decision to leave Oxford, where he had realised he was never going to fit in. But the time he had spent there was far from wasted.

Meet The Ancestors

If there is one popular activity that has become even more popular as a result of the First World War centenary, it is genealogy or the tracing of one's family connections. Innumerable people have been spurred into the investigation of their connections with individual members of the armed forces. Finding out what Granddad did in the Great War is a pastime that has led many to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front and, in some cases, has indirectly led to valuable historical research being carried out.

Take the case of Walter Parkin, a Yorkshire miner, one of seven children whose father deserted the family when Walter was twelve years old. Walter went on to serve with distinction at Passchendaele, but arrived home in 1918, severely wounded and a shadow of his former self; he died in 1933, aged only 45. In 2014, Walter's great-grandson Richard wrote about his experience of tracing the soldier's career and how it had led to the discovery of the truth behind the family legend that "the bullets just bounced off him" when he came across a 1915 newspaper article describing how his grandfather had been saved from certain death by a uniform button which had taken the brunt of the bullet's impact; both items had been temporarily on display to the public in a local shop window!

The interest doesn't stop at ancestors, either. Those whose grandparents and great-grandparents came back in one piece, or who were in the wrong age group to participate actively in the war, have generally found that they had other relations who were involved and whose history can be traced. Others - school pupils, for example - have been encouraged to follow the lives and deaths of individuals who would otherwise perhaps have had no one to mourn them.
I'm not just talking about the war poets, or people of some notability such as artists and composers, but ordinary soldiers and sailors. Sometimes, in a corner of a foreign field, you will come across little notes attached to individual graves by schoolchildren who have found out a little of that particular man's history and written to "thank" him for his contribution, occasionally with a little poem attached.

Sometimes, in the course of their investigations, people uncover less palatable facts about the lives of their ancestors. As I've probably mentioned before, my father was delighted when he discovered that his own father had spent some time in a military prison - okay, it was only for gambling. That's because the authorities didn't realise that he and his friend had stolen armed forces' property and sold it to Italian householders in order to make the money to purchase a Crown & Anchor board, which soon brought the cash rolling in. No wonder they were jumped one night, on their way home from a local drinking establishment, by locals who resented the amount of money they had taken from them earlier in the evening!

If you're wondering why my father was pleased, it was because the documentation which proved that his father had been incarcerated in early 1919, as well as the report describing the mugging in Italy, demonstrated that his father had not been telling tall tales when he described these incidents to his family. It was all true! There was some good luck involved, as many military records from the period were lost in a fire in 1940, ironically caused by Second World War bombing. I've often wondered what my grandmother thought of her husband's anecdotes; being the daughter of a chapel elder, she probably hoped against hope that their marriage had turned him into a reformed character.

I never met my grandfather as he died before my parents got married. I always assumed that this was from natural causes, as indeed it was, but sometimes I wonder how much his First World War service might have contributed to his poor health. Many men saw the war through only to die from the after-effects of gas or shrapnel wounds like the ones my grandfather had (although it is difficult, for example, to discount the effects of smoking and other factors as causes of the premature deaths of former servicemen in the post-war period).

Just recently the pension records of First World War veterans were released. Knowing that my grandfather had one, I checked it, and discovered that his mother was living in a place called Choppington. I am assuming this to be the place of that name near Newcastle-upon-Tyne; my father was unaware of any connection with.north-east England, and it is also a mystery why my great-grandmother should have been using our family surname when we know for certain that she had remarried and was using a different name in the 1911 census. Will we ever find out?

It seems to me that the interest in ancestors and what they went through is, broadly speaking, a positive phenomenon. There is nothing that brings home historical truths to an individual like their personal effects on one's family. The knowledge of what many suffered sometimes even brings about a sea-change in the attitude of their descendants towards war.

A Hogmanay Tragedy

On the morning of Wednesday, 1st January, 1919, householders in the Hebridean island of Lewis were looking forward with eager anticipation to the imminent arrival home of many of their menfolk, who had been serving with Britain's armed forces overseas in the effort to win the First World War. The fighting was behind them now, and the men themselves looked forward to returning to their homes and crofts and catching up with family life. 283 sailors were travelling home to Stornoway on the Iolaire, and at around two in the morning, they were within a few hundred yards of their home port.

The Iolaire was a yacht launched thirty-seven years earlier. It was privately owned but had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, and had been pressed into service on this occasion because there were not enough suitable vessels available to ferry home the latest band of troops returning to Scotland from active service. One man, 27-year-old Kenneth Macphail, had served throughout the war, including a stint at Gallipoli. In 1917, his ship had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean and he had survived by clinging to wreckage; he spent 34 hours in the water before being rescued, almost the only survivor. The experience was so traumatic that Kenneth, who had completed his recuperation only six months earlier, told his brother Angus that, were he ever in the same situation, he would prefer not to go through the ordeal again and would resign himself to his fate. That was why, when Kenneth's body was recovered from the sea a few days later, his hands were placed firmly in his pockets.

It is hard for most of us to imagine a person not wanting to save his or her own life, but such feelings were not uncommon among servicemen during the First World War. Kenneth Macphail was nevertheless unusual; when the Iolaire struck a rock, within sight of Stornaway harbour, and quickly sank, many of the passengers showed great heroism in trying to escape and help those around them. 201 men - more than two thirds of those aboard - died that night, but John Finlay Macleod, a 30-year-old seaman, had the knowledge of how to ride the crest of a wave to take himself safely onto the rocks, from where he set up a rescue line to bring others safely to dry land. Another survivor, Donald Morrison, actually went down with the ship but managed to climb a mast and cling to it until daylight came and he was rescued.

The causes of the Iolaire disaster were never officially stated, but there were many contributing factors: there were gale-force winds, the ship was not designed to carry so many men, and the crew had never sailed into Stornoway after dark before, and did not have adequate lookouts. The men aboard were weighed down by their uniforms and equipment. Rumours quickly spread that some of the crew had been drunk, which would not have been surprising given that it was Hogmanay and the troops were celebrating their return home. Local people held the Admiralty mainly to blame, but no one was ever disciplined for the failure to bring the men back safely.

Some called the Iolaire's sinking "the crowning sorrow of the war". Women who had been airing the civilian clothes of their husbands and sons in front of their fires found themselves bereaved and in many cases destitute. If Siegfried Sassoon thought that those at home could have no comprehension of what he and his comrades had suffered, he would have been anguished to see the impact on the small communities whose people came down to the shore to find the drowned bodies of their loved ones lined up for identification.

Afterwards, like many of those who had served at the Western Front, the people of Lewis made a point of not talking about the Iolaire disaster. They simply could not cope with the grief. In the recent BBC documentary on the subject, a psychologist pointed out that silence was the way of dealing with such emotions in those days; the islanders never had the benefit of treatment by someone like Dr William Rivers, who might have helped them talk through their thoughts and feelings in order to assuage their grief and stop them sinking into depression (the fate of some of the survivors as well as the bereaved).

Only a hundred years later, now that all those who remember it are dead and gone, has the local community felt free to acknowledge the impact of the events of 1st January 1919. On 1st January this year, Prince Charles - as Duke of Rothesay - and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon attended a memorial service at the monument to those who lost their lives on that tragic night. As a more lasting tribute, local artist Margaret Ferguson painted portraits of a hundred of the sailors, while composer Iain Morrison, the great-grandson of one of the victims, was commissioned to write a piece in memory of the events. Morrison said that he struggled with the task because he found it difficult to create anything that did not carry a sense of reflection and a message of hope. You can see part of the documentary and hear an extract from the piece on Youtube by following this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-PpKyjWseQ

Centenary Christmas Reflections

The Christmas of 1918 should have been a time to celebrate. Not only had the Kaiser been defeated, but the British people could look forward to the end of food rationing, air raids and disruption to families. Women had been given the vote and men were no longer being called on to sacrifice their lives in a foreign land. Surely everyone must have entered the festive season with optimism and goodwill?

Well, not everyone. Some people faced Christmas with the knowledge that they had lost husbands, fathers and sons; a much smaller, but still appreciable, number had lost wives, mothers or daughters. Some men remained in prisoner-of-war camps in continental Europe, while others had returned home with terrible injuries that would eventually take their lives or prevent them from holding down a job. Still others would have difficulty settling into civilian life, because of their physical or mental condition.

As for Siegfried Sassoon, not only had his life been completely changed by the experience of war, but his sudden exit from the Western Front after being shot earlier in the year had caused further upheaval. He was unimpressed with the London crowds who cheered the news of the Armistice, not knowing that among them was another young man who was going to make a major impact on his emotional development. He was introduced to an aspiring artist, Gabriel Atkin, later in the month.

The few weeks that preceded and immediately followed the end of the war found Sassoon caught up in something of a social whirl, despite the sudden death of his mentor Robert Ross in October. Introduced in turn to T E Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson and John Galsworthy, he also caught up with his former psychiatrist and father figure, Dr Rivers. The meeting with William Atkin (nicknamed "Gabriel" because of his supposed resemblance to an angel) had been engineered by another friend, the musicologist Edward Dent, who shared Sassoon's sexual preferences and foresaw that he would be attracted to Gabriel.

It is well attested that Siegfried Sassoon had eschewed physical sex until this point, and the time was ripe for him to embark on his first homosexual affair, which he soon did. Gabriel, much younger but far more worldly, entranced Siegfried with his looks and apparent need for affection. Their relationship was relatively short-lived, and would peter out when Sassoon left for a speaking tour of the United States early in 1920. They remained friends, and Sassoon occasionally toyed with the idea of renewing their affair, but was put off by the knowledge of Gabriel's addiction to drink and drugs; Gabriel eventually married a writer, and died at the age of forty.

At Christmas, Sassoon took Gabriel home to Weirleigh to meet his mother. It did not go well, and it was probably fortunate that Dr Rivers had been invited to stay with them in the post-Christmas period. Theresa Sassoon recognised the nature of her son's relationship with Gabriel, and found little common ground with the young man, despite his being, like herself, an artist. She got on much better with Rivers.

In the early stages of their affair, Gabriel described Sassoon as "the most amazing gorgeous person in the universe", unconsciously emulating the hero-worship of another of Sassoon's close friends, Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in France just before the end of the war. Sassoon does not appear to have been missing Owen, and himself says that it was months before he head the news of the latter's death; perhaps this is unsurprising, given the level of activity that followed the end of the war. It seems likely that he did not want to think of anything that would remind him of his military career, although he did introduce Gabriel to Vivian da Sola Pinto, who had been his second-in-command during his last period of overseas service, and to his great friend Robert Graves.

Graves had upset Sassoon by getting married and starting a family. Siegfried firmly believed that Robert was denying his true nature by marrying - though he would himself eventually do the same. It was the beginning of the end of their friendship, but for now the relations between them remained cordial, at least on the surface. In the meantime, Sassoon did something he had never thought of doing before the war, and got a job. He had spent much of early 1919 in Oxford, where he met people like John Masefield and Robert Bridges and intended to remain for a period of "independent study". He soon realised that this was a dream rather than a practical proposal, and was pleased to accept the post of Literary Editor of the Daily Herald.

In working for a newspaper that supported the Labour Party, Sassoon was dabbling in politics, with the encouragement of Dr Rivers, himself a prospective Labour candidate. It would never come to anything, but it gave him temporary satisfaction to feel he was adopting principles that he had developed as a result of his war service - a period during which he had begun to feel intense sympathy for the working classes who made up the majority of the men he associated with at the Western Front.

This post could easily turn into a saga if I were to continue. I would recommend any reader who wants to know more about Siegfried's post-war life to go to the second volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson's biography of Sassoon, The Journey from the Trenches, which tells the story far better than I can ever hope to do.

All Kinds of Conferencing

Literary conferences aren't about making money, and it's just as well. All too often, they make a financial loss - that is the price of trying to bring the work of writers like Sassoon and Owen to a wider audience.

Those who have never attended a conference will have a false impression of what it involves. "Was your conference very dull?" asked a fellow-guest at my hotel in Oxford, as I returned from a satisfying day of lectures at Wolfson College. Did she really think I would be paying to attend something I didn't enjoy? Or did she perhaps assume that I was being forced to attend, for the good of my career?

It's true that many of the delegates at literary conferences in general are academics. However, that is not the case with the annual meetings of most literary societies. Of the nearly 30 people at our recent Marlborough conference, only one could truly be described as an academic, though a few were teachers or librarians by profession. But there were also lawyers, doctors, firefighters, social workers and IT specialists, all interested in Siegfried Sassoon for different reasons. You don't have to be highly qualified to enjoy good writing.

There's a book in the "Thursday Next" series of fantasy novels by Jasper Fforde in which Thursday (the heroine) learns that Pride & Prejudice is to be made into a reality TV show; she pulls a fast one on the producers by telling the characters to "do what you would normally do" rather than acting up for the cameras. The result is a huge number of additional viewers tuning in to find out whether Jane will marry Mr Bingley and what will happen to Lydia. The moral is that good literature is much more interesting than the faked on-screen bitching and "relationships" that millennials seem to find so fascinating.

What's more, most of our talks are not specifically about literature but about many other aspects of Sassoon's life and work. Most SSF members agree that he is more than a mere subject for literary criticism; he emerges in his writing as a three-dimensional human being, not always admirable in his conduct, but certainly always interesting.

Enough of that. It can't be denied that conferences come in all shapes and sizes. The "Wilfred Owen and Beyond" conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, was - sadly - not as well attended as had been hoped. This was partly because the dozens of people who had applied to speak and had their proposals turned down decided not to come along to hear those who had been successful. I believe that this is fairly normal for academics, who are increasingly under pressure to publish research and present at conferences in order to maintain their CVs. That is such a pity. I don't know what proportion of those who submitted proposals were actually in academia, but I suspect it was the majority; certainly there were no speakers at the conference who were not either academics or students, which is in contrast with my experiences at Sassoon conferences.

The "call for papers" encourages younger academics and graduate students to prepare something for a literary conference, and the competition can be considerable, but it is also potentially divisive. Umbrage may be taken by those whose papers were not selected, especially if they are long-standing members of organisations (such as literary societies) dedicated to furthering particular authors or aspects of literature and feel that their enthusiastic ideas have been passed over in favour of bigger "names".

At the other extreme you will find many literary societies that are not in the least highbrow. Come to the Barbara Pym Society's annual conference and you will meet a handful of academics,(and those mostly from overseas). The speaker programme generally includes a few, but it also typically includes people who have no pretensions to "lecturing" in the normal sense of the word. For example, at this year's conference, one of the most interesting talks was given by a member who had set herself the task of attempting to make some of the dishes mentioned in Pym's novels, using contemporary recipes.

The post-centenary ennui that appears to threaten the continuity of organisations such as the Western Front Association and the societies dedicated to the poets of the First World War is only to be expected. I feel as though we have just been on the receiving end of the Ludendorff Offensive and are enjoying one last gasp of success as we celebrate the Armistice.

What next for the Sassoon Fellowship? I look forward to a period when we will give closer examination to the post-war lives of 1914-18 veterans and to the work produced by one of Britain's greatest prose writers between the 1920s and 1940s. I wonder if I will make it to the centenary of the end of the Second World War, and, if I do, how much my opinion of conferences will have changed.

Not a Disappointment

There is no doubt that the number of members attending our recent annual conference at Marlborough College was lower than we had expected and hoped. It confirmed me in my growing impression that, after nearly four years, the general public is quickly losing interest in the centenary of the First World War, and perhaps also in the "War" poets. This, coupled with the other factors I mentioned in my report on the year at the AGM (Brexit and consequent tightening of belts, and the less-than-ideal accessibility of the venue), goes a long way to explain the poor attendance.

As one person after another pulled out of the event at the last minute, I grew more and more despondent about its success, but on the evening of Saturday 20th October, I felt great satisfaction at how the conference had gone in general. The SSF will undoubtedly lose money - quite a lot of money - on the event, but even thirty people can still have a good conference, as this one undoubtedly was.

One of the good things about the day was the opportunity to hear Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a long-standing patron and the author of a recent biography of Robert Graves, talk about the "fruitful triangle" of poets - Sorley, Sassoon and Graves - with the latter providing an unexpected link between the two old Marlburians. But that was just for starters.

Philip Neale, a newcomer to us but already seeming like an old friend, is the Chair of the T E Lawrence Society, and talked about Lawrence's attempts to become a writer, a process on which Sassoon's enthusiastic and (sometimes sardonic) encouraging words had a not inconsiderable influence.

"It is a GREAT BOOK, blast you!" Sassoon wrote exasperatedly, in response to yet another self-doubting enquiry from the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. "Are you satisfied, you tank-investigating eremite?"

Whether or not you think that Seven Pillars is a great book (and it was interesting to learn from Philip that most of those who begin reading it never finish it), the fact that Sassoon thought so is evidence that it is worth the effort of doing one's best to appreciate it for what it is. Phlip's explanation of how Lawrence and his editors worked on it over a long period makes one wonder how it might have ended up being revised if Lawrence had lived to a ripe old age. Would he, like Sassoon in old age, have considered much of his earlier work immature and unworthy of consideration? Would he, with the benefit of hindsight, have brought out yet another edition?

For dessert (after tea) we heard a sparkling talk from Jonathan Fryer on the subject of Robbie Ross (the centenary of whose death we mark this autumn) and his mastery of early twentieth-century forms of social networking. Ross is a figure who continues to intrigue and attract many students of literature, and this is a topic we might profitably explore further at some future event.

All in all, a successful conference by anyone's standards, I think. At any rate, all the delegates thanked us for organising it and commented how much they had enjoyed the day. The catering was pretty good too.

Little Blunden

The well-known poetry publisher Carcanet has just brought out a new edition of Edmund Blunden's poems. It occurred to me that I haven't written much about Blunden in this blog, and it's quite a while since I even mentioned him, so I feel I should redress the balance. After all, he was Siegfried Sassoon's best friend, and while he didn't perhaps influence Siegfried's poetic development in the way Robert Graves and others did, he certainly influenced him as a person, probably for the better.

Blunden was born in 1896, and thus was ten years Sassoon's junior. Had they met during the war, their relationship might have been very different. Blunden was at Oxford with Graves after the war, but did not stay the course. This may have had something to do with his decision to marry, in 1918. He and his wife Mary moved into a tiny cottage in Boars Hill, an area also frequented by Graves and Sassoon in the immediate post-war period, although it was some time before he and Sassoon became close friends. Some years ago, the SSF visited the house; in our company was Margi Blunden, one of Blunden's daughters from a later marriage; she was astonished to see how small it was.

On that occasion, Margi told us the sad story of how Blunden and his wife Mary had lost their first child, a daughter named Joy, as a result of being sold contaminated baby milk. The child was only a few weeks old when she died, and her father's grief inspired him to write a number of poems. It was barely a year since Blunden had seen service on the Western Front during the Great War; there he had experienced things as dreadful as what Sassoon and Owen had faced.

No wonder he took offence at the content of Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, published at around the same time. By 1928 he and Sassoon had become firm friends, having met through poetry rather than a short-lived wartime camaraderie. From their correspondence, Sassoon immediately recognised Blunden as a potential kindred spirit. It may even have been Blunden who introduced Sassoon to the work of Henry Vaughan, about which I have already written so much that you do not want to hear it again. They subsequently found further common ground in their mutual love of cricket, and it was Blunden who would later orchestrate a meeting between Sassoon and the young cricketer Dennis Silk, now President of the SSF, resulting in another firm and long-lasting friendship.

Blunden's marriage, adversely affected both by the trauma of Joy's death (even though they had another two children together) and later by Blunden's decision to take up an academic post in Japan, broke down in the late 1920s and the couple divorced in 1931. Blunden found some comfort in his relationship with Sylva, a writer, whom he married in 1933. There were no children from this second marriage, which ended in 1945. The Second World War brought further upheaval, and Blunden became friendly with a young student, Claire Poynting, who was studying at St Hilda's (by coincidence, my alma mater). Ironically, Claire's love of cricket was one of the things that brought them together.

Claire was the mother of Margi and another three daughters, and the love of cricket has extended into the next generation, with Margi's son Ted Miller being one of those who have won the "Man of the Match" award at our annual commemoration of the "Flower Show Match" at Matfield. Blunden's marriage to Claire finally brought him the settled family life and band of children he had hoped for, and which Siegfried Sassoon would have liked to emulate through his own marriage to Hester. Perhaps his reason for introducing Siegfried and Dennis had something to do with his understanding of Siegfried's longing for a son who would share his interests, since George Sassoon lived with his mother in Scotland and did not see as much of his father as both would have liked.

There is certainly no doubt that Sassoon's post-war life would have been a lot emptier without his friendship with Edmund Blunden. The picture shown is the famous photograph of the older Siegfried, flanked by Edmund and Dennis, sitting on the porch at Heytesbury House, listening to "Test Match Special".