Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  In a later letter about the incident, Brooke did try to come clean about his true nature: ‘My dear, I’m a wanderer. If you are, too – if you’re satisfied with taking what you can get, and giving in or not as it happens – then we can give each other things. If, as I suspect, you are disposed to normality – then I shall harm and hurt you too much.’ Brooke was right. Despite her arty airs, at heart Phyllis was a conventionally Edwardian one-man woman. It was her misfortune that her man was the wayward and terminally inconstant Brooke. ‘I wish you wouldn’t accept hedonism with acquiescence,’ she wrote to him in reply to his confession. ‘If you commit yourself to it, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to say I won’t see you … If you think I don’t care you’re very wrong. It’s about the hardest thing I have to say I’ve ever said. It’d be less trouble to be dead.’

  Probably as a result of the crisis, Phyllis fell ill and her mother stepped in to protect her, writing a severe letter to Brooke about his caddish behaviour. A contrite poet responded to Mary in March: ‘You hate me for my general character and for my behaviour towards her. Rightly, I suppose … And if she is ill in any way through me, I have failed and deserve any blame.’

  Brooke responded to the imbroglio – and his own infatuation with Cathleen – with flight. He was already planning his open-ended trip to America that would eventually take him to the South Seas, and on 21 May 1913, on the eve of his departure, he wrote to Phyllis to bid her farewell. ‘I gather you think me evil. Well, I’m sorry. And I think you’re wrong … But if I have hurt you: if you have suffered any pain on account of me, I am very deeply sorry.’ From the South Pacific in November 1913 he wrote definitely warning Phyllis off and emphasizing his own failings, repeating that he was ‘a wanderer’ while she was ‘made for love and marriage’. He had already written his letter of farewell to Ka, in New York, in precisely the same terms of dismissal.

  Exactly one year later, Phyllis and Brooke met for what would prove the final time, in London. The world was now at war and Brooke, his long locks cropped, was in the uniform of Churchill’s Royal Naval Division and had already briefly tasted action at Antwerp. The meeting, in a café in Charing Cross, was arranged over the telephone by Mary Gardner, who was concerned that Phyllis was still pining for Brooke. With Mary acting as chaperone, as she had at the outset of their affair, the café chatter was notably constrained and trivial. Brooke looked tired and was suffering from conjunctivitis (or ‘pink eye’), one of his frequent maladies when under strain, and Phyllis felt unable to voice her true feelings. ‘It might have been different if we had known that this was the last time that we should see one another,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘I would have dearly liked to take him in my arms and say “Poor Boy, I’m so sorry for you”.’

  In Spring, Brooke left for the Dardanelles, and in late April 1915 Phyllis had a sudden spasm of acute anxiety about him, causing her to ask in her journal: ‘Is R. alright?’ By 26 April news of Brooke’s death was public, not least by way of Eddie’s obituary and Churchill’s tribute in The Times. A few days later, on 3 May, Mary Gardner received a letter that had been written by a grief-stricken Eddie explaining that Brooke had died on 23 April and was buried on Skyros. As with so many of Brooke’s bereft lovers and friends, Phyllis was plunged into a chasm of mourning by the news. Apparently, the two of them had made a pact that they would appear to each other on their death, and one night, sitting on her mother’s bed, she imagined that the light of the gas lamp on the ceiling took on Brooke’s comely form.

  To get over her grief, Phyllis plunged into war work. By a curious coincidence, she worked for the Admiralty’s Intelligence Department – the same division as the equally bereft Ka, though we have no idea whether the two women met, and if so, whether they reminisced over their lost lover. Phyllis confined her own memories to the pages of her memoir, which she wrote in 1918.

  Phyllis Gardner never got over Rupert Brooke. Between the wars, she visited his grave on Skyros and illustrated an edition of his poems with her woodcuts of the island. Although she never married, she made her independent life not only as an artist, but also as a breeder of gigantic Irish wolfhounds, a subject on which she became the leading authority, writing and publishing a treatise, ‘The Irish Wolfhound’, in 1931.

  She died of breast cancer on 16 February 1939 – the same year that her father passed away – leaving her memoir, and her dogs, to her sister Delphis. The Gardner family are buried in the churchyard of St James the Less, Stubbings, near Maidenhead. Although the grave of her parents has a headstone, probably designed by Phyllis herself, her own grave is unmarked and crossed by a path. At the time of writing, the Rupert Brooke Society has launched an appeal to erect a headstone for her.

  At the height of their relationship in November 1912, Phyllis had written to Brooke:

  Yes, some day I’ll die: so will you. But I’d rather not think of it … you’re built of fire and you must be perfectly free: you belong to nobody, as you said. But when all’s said, I feel as if I too were built of fire and for liberty.

  *

  The current keepers of Brooke’s reputation: the Trustees who have succeeded Keynes and Ward as guardians of his Estate, are the poets and biographers Professor Jon Stallworthy and Sir Andrew Motion. It may seem strange that two distinguished professors and poets should concern themselves with such an unfashionable figure as Brooke. But, as Delany indicates, it is undeniable that Brooke exercises the sort of lasting appeal of a Shelley, Keats or Byron – poets whose deaths in foreign fields seem as symbolically potent as the verse they left behind.

  A century on, during a time of renewed interest in a world that has only recently slipped over the horizon of living memory, it seems likely that Brooke’s life and legend will loom larger as he recedes into history.

  A few years ago I beat a path to Skyros, and read those words of the poet carved on the grave’s thick foot. The silence beat down like sunlight. Insects clicked and lizards scuttled, and time, as Alan Moorehead wrote of the graves of Gallipoli, went by ‘in an endless dream’. Idly, I picked up one of the sharp marble rocks, those pink and white chunks, that still litter the place.

  There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; …

  The richer dust of Brooke’s reality that lay undiscovered for decades in the shallow grave of his manufactured myth has at last broken through a crumbling legend of lies. The man who was fashioned into smooth marble has become a man again. And not before time.

  * * *

  Afterword:

  The Strange Death of Ka Cox

  * * *

  While waiting in a supermarket during a Cornish holiday a few years ago, I idly picked up a paperback, Haunted Cornwall, by Paul Newman, a local historian. I was astonished to read in it a brief account of alleged sinister supernatural occurrences surrounding the death of Ka Arnold-Forster (née Cox), who can fairly be called – among all his other involvements – the love of Brooke’s life. She was certainly the most enduring.

  I lost no time in getting in touch with Mr Newman and discovered that he had followed up the story and written a full, if somewhat rambling, account of the episode in a privately published book dramatically entitled The Tregerthen Horror. Though there was no concrete evidence of foul or supernatural play in Ka’s demise, Newman had certainly established that a body of legend and Cornish folk myth had grown up surrounding the event, whose circumstances, to say the least, were strange.*

  After their marriage, Will and Ka Arnold-Forster had moved in 1921 to the village of Zennor, in the very far western corner of Cornwall between the Atlantic and the menhir-studded moors, a wild and untamed country rich in myth and legend. They bought a house precariously perched over the sea called The Eagle’s Nest, where Ka gave birth to their only child, Mark (later a prominent journalist and television producer, as well as a hero of the Second World War in his father’s old service, the Royal Navy).

  At the house, Will laboured to cultivate a garden replete with
rare shrubs, plants and trees in nooks and crannies sheltered from the fierce Atlantic storms. Together, the couple were also devoted to Labour Party and to Fabian politics, and they were both tireless in promoting these and other local interests. Ka became Cornwall’s first female magistrate, and Will chaired the Cornish branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, fighting to conserve the unique Cornish landscape.

  It seems fair to say that local people regarded the couple’s worthy activities with a certain amount of amused scepticism. Neither Will nor Ka were Cornish by birth or upbringing, and the traditional Cornish suspicion of outsiders was exacerbated by their eager proselytizing for radical progressive causes. In any event, according to Newman, the slim, slight Will became known to locals as ‘Little Stick’, while his ever-heavier wife was called ‘Big Stick’.

  Increasingly, however, Will’s international interests dominated his life. He became one of the leading British proponents of the League of Nations, and he was often absent abroad on League business. During one such trip, in May 1938, when he was in North America on a lecture tour and Mark was away at his Scottish boarding school, Gordonstoun, Ka’s life came to an abrupt end.

  Newman believed that the root cause of Ka’s death can be traced back to the malign antipathy of none other than Aleister Crowley, the era’s notorious black magician. Dubbed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ by the tabloid press of the day, Crowley had laboured hard to perfect his own image as a dark magus, whom rumour credited with several deaths and participation in unspeakable magical cults and rites, involving sexual perversion and animal – and possibly human – sacrifice. Such supernatural dabbling would certainly not have been to the taste of Will and Ka, and the story goes that when she became aware that Crowley was visiting Cornish acolytes and indulging in Satanic rites, Ka, in her capacity as a Justice of the Peace, arranged to have him expelled from the county.

  Unlikely though this seems – and there is no hard evidence for it – it is true that there was a precedent in the county for getting rid of eccentric and unwanted strangers. During the Great War, the writer D.H. Lawrence had been expelled from Cornwall under the draconian provisions of the wartime DORA – the Defence of the Realm Act. Lawrence had been living close to The Eagle’s Nest in a farm cottage in Zennor and was writing his masterpiece Women in Love. Locals were suspicious of this bearded interloper with a German wife, and rumour credited Lawrence and Frieda with signalling to U-boats at sea using the washing on their line! The authorities eventually acted on the rumours and ordered the author out, creating a lasting antipathy between Lawrence and his native land. Whether Ka followed this precedent of how to treat ‘undesirables’ is not known.

  In the late 1930s, Ka and Will acquired a new neighbour. A young couple named Vaughan had moved into a remote and tiny dwelling called Carn Cottage – barely more than a hut – crowning the moors on a hill half a mile or so above The Eagle’s Nest. Ka, still displaying the motherly, caring character that her friends had always valued, befriended the young pair, and when they reported sinister manifestations of a supernatural nature around their cottage, she agreed to help. The Vaughans said that clocks would mysteriously stop at 3 a.m., shadows would flit across their windows when no-one was there, and that there was a general air of menace about the place. They became so agitated that Ka agreed to sit up with them ghost-watching for a night, to reassure them that there was no demonic presence around.

  According to a letter written a few days after Ka’s death by Sir Arthur (later Lord) Salter, a Labour politician and Oxford academic who was a close friend of the Arnold-Forsters (and, according to Mark, was more than a little in love with his mother), ‘The end was tragic and characteristic.’ What happened was this:

  She had tired herself out with clearing up before going away [on a restorative holiday] and then she learnt that there was a half-crazy couple in a hut on the hill above the Eagle’s Nest, the woman thinking that she saw ghosts and spirits at night.

  Ka thought that if she spent a night in the hut she could persuade the woman that there were no such things and cure her; so on the Saturday night, already tired, she struggled up the hill and the stroke came in the hut. If she’d not done that, she might have survived.

  Salter, like the Arnold-Forsters a solemn rationalist, attributed Ka’s fatal stroke unequivocally to high blood pressure, tiredness and overwork; but local talk told another story. According to persistent rumour, Mrs Vaughan had arrived at The Eagle’s Nest late on the night of 22/23 May in a state of incoherent distress, babbling about evil spirits and something having happened to both Ka and her husband. A rescue party was organized, and it climbed up the moorland track to Carn Cottage, where Ka was found dead and Mr Vaughan in a state of gibbering insanity.

  Ka’s heavy body (Brooke had referred to her, un-chivalrously, as an ‘immense woman’) was brought down from the cottage by her gardener with some difficulty – and lack of dignity – in a wheelbarrow. Mr Vaughan was removed to the Cornwall County Asylum at Bodmin, where he is said to have spent the rest of his days hopelessly insane. (The Asylum’s records are closed to researchers.) Mrs Vaughan disappeared from the story – and from history.

  That there is some factual basis to this story is suggested not only by Salter’s veiled references and stories picked up by Paul Newman, but also by a short story ‘Night at the Carn’ by the notable Cornish-born and Oxford-educated historian A.L. Rowse. In a volume of the same title, published in 1983, Rowse – who knew the Arnold-Forsters through their joint political work for the Labour Party in the early 1930s – lightly disguised the couple as ‘Virginia and Matthew’, but rather unkindly chastised them for being ‘entirely English’ rather than native Cornish, and for being patronizing, middle-class Leftists, ’two outliers of Bloomsbury living in our midst’. Rowse turns the couple living at Carn Cottage into an old witch nicknamed ‘Crazy Eliza’, whom Virginia/Ka is always trying to send to a home or pack off on a long seaside holiday. Transferring the night of her death appropriately to All Hallows’ Eve, Rowse has Virginia/Ka struggling up the hill to the cottage to sit up with Eliza. The story then ends abruptly: ‘What happened that night in the course of Virginia’s night-watch no-one knew. It was not the old crone who died, but Virginia … .’

  A memorial service was held for Ka within days of her death, on 1 June 1938, at St Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square. With Will still absent in America, mourners were led by her son Mark and a host of Labour and Liberal luminaries, as well as old Neo-Pagan and Cambridge friends, including a sprinkling of Stracheys, Keyneses, Raverats and Brooke’s faithful friend and heir Dudley Ward.

  Will did not stay single for long. The following year, 1939, he married Ruth Mallory, widow of George Mallory, the legendary mountaineer (and another rumoured lover of Brooke) who had died attempting to scale Mount Everest in 1924. But Ruth died in January 1942. Bereft, Will survived for another decade. He continued gardening and painting, and just days before he died, in October 1951, he held an exhibition of his pastels and moorland landscapes at a London gallery in Old Bond Street.

  Mark subsequently sold The Eagle’s Nest to the distinguished artist Patrick Heron, whose daughters own it still. Carn Cottage, the scene of Ka’s mysterious passing, became the home of another painter, Bryan Winter, who lived there with a pet raven. The bird’s name was ‘Doom’.

  * See The Tregerthen Horror by Paul Newman (Abraxas Editions, 2005) and Night at the Carn by A.L. Rowse (William Kimber, 1983).

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  For an exclusive preview of Nigel Jones’ Peace and War: Britain in 1914, read on or click the image:

  Or for more information, click one of the links below:

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Sources and Further Reading

  Index

  Picture credits

  ~

  Nigel Jones

  More books by Nigel Jones

  An invitation from the publisher


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  1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without: Ireland trembled on the brink of civil war; suffragette agitation was assuming an ever more violent hue; and suspicions of Germany’s ambitions bred a paranoia that was expressed in a rash of ‘invasion scare’ literature. When shots rang out in Sarajevo on 28 June, they set in train a tumble of diplomatic dominoes that led to Britain declaring war on Germany on 4 August, ushering in four years of global conflict.

  Nigel Jones portrays every facet of a year that changed Britain for ever: from gun-running in Ulster to an attack by suffragettes on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery; from the launch of the ocean liner HMHS Britannic to the publication of the avant-garde magazine BLAST; and from the whirl of Edwardian high society’s ‘last summer’ to the embarkation for Belgium of the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force (arrogantly dismissed by the German Kaiser as ‘a contemptible little army’), he traces the events of a momentous year from benign domestic beginnings to descent into the nightmare of European war.