Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  On the first day of the exam at Somerville, however, she quickly discovered that she had been studying along the wrong lines, reading too much criticism of the writers rather than the writers themselves. Beginning the first paper, she almost lost her nerve and thought of packing up and going home. But she regained her composure and decided that she had nothing to lose by staying and completing the exam.

  Vera’s persistence was rewarded a few days later when a letter arrived from Miss Penrose informing her that the College had awarded her an exhibition (a minor scholarship) of £20 per annum – roughly £2000 in modern terms – for three years, on condition that she passed the Oxford Senior Local in July.

  Her parents were overcome with pride and delight, and for Vera a new chapter seemed to beckon. ‘Oxford I trust may lead to something’, she wrote, drawing a line under this period of her life, ‘but Buxton never will’.

  At this point, Roland Leighton enters the story properly for the first time.[ii] In mid-April, a month after the Somerville exam, Roland arrived at Melrose to spend part of the Easter holidays with his school friend Edward Brittain. At least, that was originally the plan, but in the course of the visit he found himself more often than not in the company of Edward’s sister, discussing their ideas of immortality, talking about books, criticising each other’s poetry – and succumbing to a mutual attraction. At just 19, Roland was the golden boy of his year at Uppingham School. He was head of his (and Edward’s) house, The Lodge; a Praepositor (school prefect); President of the Debating Society; Editor of the school magazine. His outstanding academic record at the school had been crowned at the beginning of the year with the award of the Senior Open Classical Postmastership at Merton College, Oxford, for the coming October. Together with Edward, and another friend from their house, Victor Richardson, Roland formed part of an inseparable trio, dubbed by his mother ‘The Three Musketeers’. He was the undoubted leader of this small group, as his school nickname, ‘Monseigneur’, testified.

  Although Roland was her junior by more than a year, Vera was never to think of him as younger for, as she wrote later, he looked 24, and had the self-assurance and confidence of someone of 30. He was disdainful of popularity (another thing they had in common), conceited, and inclined to express his condescending response to other people’s ideas in what she mockingly referred to as ‘the Quiet Voice’. In looks he was less striking, of stocky build and with ‘hair like a brush & a mouth too resolute for the smallest degree of beauty’. He did, however, have ‘deep intelligent eyes’, and was indisputably brilliant, ‘& most interesting to talk to’.

  Crucially, there was something else about Roland that made him stand out for Vera: both his parents were writers, and he, too, had clear ambitions in this direction, publishing his poetry in the Uppingham magazine, and allowing Edward to set one of his poems, entitled ‘L’Envoi’, to music. Robert Leighton, Roland’s father, had in 1896 been the first literary editor of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, and was the author of adventure stories for boys. His mother, Marie Connor Leighton, daughter of a captain in the 87th Royal Irish Foot, wrote popular romances, serialised in the Northcliffe Press, and collaborated on works of detective fiction with her husband. Marie’s own books, though, were the Leighton family’s main source of income. The early realisation that the entire household revolved around his mother’s writing, as his father’s earned much less, Roland claimed, had made him a feminist.

  Not that feminism found any favour in Marie Leighton’s eyes. She liked tidy, conventional, romantic endings, and said that she would have been happy to be a kept woman if only her husband’s income had permitted. Marie was the archetypal romantic novelist. Eccentric, and larger than life, she was usually resplendent in enormous hats and colourful, unfashionable clothes, generally trailing petticoats. The Leightons with their three children – a daughter, Clare, and younger son, Evelyn, completed the family – led a chaotic, bohemian existence at ‘Vallombrosa’, their exotically named London home at 40 Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, where they socialised with famous writers like George Meredith and Hall Caine, struggled to meet deadlines and avoided their creditors (only the lower classes, Marie maintained, paid their bills on time). Every summer the family, their servants and dogs, migrated to a turreted seaside villa at Lowestoft in Suffolk, perched perilously high on top of a cliff.

  The household may have revolved around Marie’s work, but her passion and devotion centred on Roland to the exclusion of everyone else. Marie’s love for him was an extraordinary fixation, deriving no doubt from the death of her first child, another son, accidentally smothered by his nurse soon after his birth. As an infant, Roland was spoiled by a mother who dressed him in expensive clothes and refused to allow his long blonde curls to be cut. Marie and Roland shared their own special intimacy, which naturally contributed to his sense of himself as far above the ordinary, while relegating his younger sister and brother to an upbringing of casual emotional neglect.

  Before Vera departed Buxton to visit some relatives in the Lake District, leaving Roland behind at Melrose to make up for lost time with Edward, Roland made a promise that he would send her a copy of his favourite book, a novel by Olive Schreiner entitled The Story of an African Farm. A copy duly arrived, inscribed by Roland, with a letter in which he wrote of Vera’s resemblance to Lyndall, the novel’s feminist heroine, who defies convention, but then has the misfortune to die in the process as the result of giving birth to a child out of wedlock; only Roland considered Lyndall ‘sadder & less charmingly controversial’.

  Like Lyndall, Vera confided to her diary, one May evening, that she desired not only sympathetic companionship but also ‘someone to worship’. But who was the object of that worship to be? Joseph Ward, the Fairfield curate, whose struggles, in between further Latin and Maths for her Oxford exam, Vera was still following closely, or Roland Leighton?

  Three days at Uppingham, accompanied by Mrs Brittain, for Edward’s final Speech Day in the second week of July, the high point of the school year, confirmed Roland’s attraction for her. He shared her faults, talents and ideas, Vera told her diary, to a degree she hadn’t experienced before. Not only did he play a leading part in the inspection of the Officers Training Corps, in which he held the rank of Colour Sergeant, he also carried off an unprecedented seven prizes at the prize-giving. At the Headmaster’s garden party that followed, she and Roland got into an earnest discussion about The Story of an African Farm, and Roland’s conviction that there must be an after-life in which human beings could continue the work that they had begun on earth. Vera’s only regret about her time at Uppingham was that she had been unable to meet Roland’s mother, reportedly detained at home finishing a book.

  Programme for the Uppingham School Speech Day, in July 1914, later described by Vera as ‘the one perfect summer idyll that I ever experienced’.

  Edward and Victor Richardson, the other two ‘musketeers’, looked upon Roland with awe, even as they fought to escape from his shadow and teased him about his conceit. Edward, who played a violin solo in the school concert, had failed to come out top in any subject. It was his ‘special prerogative’, he told his mother, disappointedly, to be second or third in everything he did. Victor Richardson had won prizes for Modern History and reading, and was destined for Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he had a place to read medicine. The son of the junior partner of a dental practice from Hove, in East Sussex, Victor was recovering from the family tragedy that had deprived him, and his younger brother Maurice, of their mother, 18 months earlier. Carrie Richardson had been 47 at the time of her death from cerebrospinal meningitis. As his nicknames, ‘Father Confessor’ and ‘The Brighton Block’, suggest, Victor was a loyal and steadfast friend, valued for his discretion with other people’s confidences (indicating, perhaps, that he may already have had the makings of a good bedside-manner).

  At the prize-giving ceremony, on 11 July, the Headmaster, the Revd H. W. McKenzie, gave a short speech, the climax of which was that ‘if a ma
n could not be useful to his country he was better dead’. Vera copied the remark into her diary without comment. Uppingham’s ethos of militarism – and its related values of honour, chivalry, duty and ‘heroism in the abstract’ – was preparing pupils for the eventuality of a war in which public schoolboys like Roland, Edward and Victor would play a leading part. Vera’s own attraction to these ideals was evident. She admired the ‘fine sight’ of the Corps, as it was inspected by the Headmaster, listened attentively to his speech, describing him as ‘a splendid man’ – in spite of ‘his contempt for women’ – and regretted the absence of an equivalent to Uppingham’s ‘fine traditions’ at schools for girls.

  In fact war clouds were beginning to gather much more threateningly than anyone at Uppingham, during three fine days of glorious, unbroken weather, could have suspected. On 20 July, Vera sat the exam for the Oxford Senior Local Examinations. A fortnight later the international situation reached a crisis point when Germany invaded Belgium as a preliminary to an attack on France. At 11 p.m., on 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany.

  [i] The extension movement, established in the final decades of the nineteenth century, was designed to promote the spread of learning beyond the universities. Women, permitted to study at university, but still prevented from taking degrees, were one of its main audiences.

  [ii] Vera had first met Roland the previous June at the Uppingham ‘Old Boys’. In her diary she recorded that ‘he seems so clever & amusing & hardly shy at all.’

  2 Love and War 1914–1915

  Although she would later try to distance herself from them, Vera Brittain’s views and opinions in August 1914, as expressed in her diary and letters, demonstrate a predominantly conventional response to the outbreak of war. She had followed closely the build-up to the July Crisis, and the resulting ‘world-wide catastrophe’, with mounting excitement. On 25 July she recorded Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia and, four days later, the declaration of war between the two countries, which lit the touch paper for a conflagration that would set Europe ablaze. By Saturday 1 August, following news of the mobilisation of the German army, Vera realised that the last hopes for peace were rapidly receding. On the third, after reading various newspapers for a couple of hours over breakfast, she announced to her diary: ‘That which has been so long anticipated by some & scoffed at by others has come to pass at last – Armageddon in Europe!’

  Britain alone appeared to tremble on the brink, with Asquith’s Liberal cabinet split on the momentous question of whether to enter the war to come to France’s aid. At this point, Vera’s diary entries swell with all the bombastic rhetoric of a leader from The Times. ‘The great fear now’, she wrote on Bank Holiday Monday, 3 August, the day on which the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey appealed in the House of Commons for the country’s support for war, ‘is that our bungling Government will declare England’s neutrality’. Adopting Grey’s line, Vera argued that it would be an act of ‘the grossest treachery’ should ‘we at this critical juncture … refuse to help our friend France.’

  Accompanied by her parents the next day, Vera rushed into the centre of town to search for further news. A large crowd surrounded the front of Buxton’s Town Hall, where a mobilisation order in eye-catching black letters had been posted, ordering army regulars and territorials to their headquarters. Germany’s invasion of Belgium had satisfied most of the waverers in the Government by giving Britain’s cause a moral rectitude, and the evening paper contained the startling news that Britain had sent an ultimatum to Germany, to expire at 11 p.m. (Greenwich Mean Time), demanding the immediate withdrawal of her troops from Belgium. Vera imagined ‘All the nations of this continent … ready with their swords drawn’, while ‘Germany the aggressor with her weaker ally Austria stands alone facing an armed Europe united against her’. But she also recognised that this would be a mechanised war like no other in history, and that ‘the destruction attainable by the modern war machines used by the armies is unthinkable & past imagination.’

  On 5 August, in the absence of any response to its ultimatum, the country awoke to find itself at war with Germany. Later that day, Vera showed Edward an appeal, printed in The Times and the Chronicle, for unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 30 to join the army. He immediately became very enthusiastic about volunteering, and set about trying to offer himself as a recruit, along with his school friend and Buxton neighbour Maurice Ellinger, initially without much success.

  Vera’s eagerness to support her brother’s desire to enlist was matched only by her father’s obduracy in opposing it. As Edward, at 18, was below military age, he required his father’s permission before his application could be accepted by the War Office, and this Arthur Brittain stubbornly withheld, much to Vera’s indignation. ‘… Daddy worked himself into a thorough temper, raved away at us, & said he would not allow Edward to go abroad whatever happened … Edward replied quite calmly that no one could prevent him serving his country in any way he wanted to.’

  The extent of Vera’s investment in the public school values of duty, honour and heroism, and in a conventional ideal of middle-class masculinity, was to become even clearer as the family continued to debate Edward’s future. She reproached her father for his ‘unmanliness’, and for not possessing ‘the requisite courage’. She worried that other Buxtonians might judge them unfavourably. Most of all, she subscribed to Edward’s somewhat priggish belief that Mr Brittain’s lack of a public school education and training meant that he ‘could not possibly understand the impossibility of his remaining in inglorious safety while others, scarcely older than he, were offering their all.’ Mr Brittain, Vera wrote scathingly in her diary, after the row had raged for a month, did not care about his son’s honour or courage as long as he was safe. She and Edward would have to live up to their patriotic name of ‘Brittain’ as their father manifestly would not.

  Vera’s diary entry for 4 August 1914, expressing her excitement at ‘the stupendous events of this remarkable day’ as Britain moved inexorably closer to war.

  Ultimately, Arthur Brittain was forced to give way, especially after Edith Brittain, who had initially expressed similar reservations about Edward entering the army, conceded that if Edward’s honour was at stake then he really should be permitted to go. ‘… Dreary as life is without his presence here,’ Vera had admitted from the outset, ‘dreary as are the prospects of what may lie before him, yet I would not have his decision back, or keep him here’. Later, seeing Edward in his uniform, she imbued him with martial glamour and judged him ‘a fit object of devotion’.

  By understanding how important it was that her brother should not be ‘branded for life’ because he had failed to take part ‘in the greatest struggle in modern times’, Vera was implicitly acknowledging the already widespread existence of white feather campaigns, spearheaded by women and currently springing up around the country. Women’s handing out of white feathers – a traditional symbol of cowardice – was a deliberate act of public humiliation to shame men not in uniform into enlisting.

  The impact of these campaigns, coupled with the effects of government propaganda encouraging women to play a part in pressuring men to volunteer, can be seen in Vera’s reaction to her erstwhile suitor, Bertram Spafford. Spafford at first resisted applying for a commission, as he was concerned about the effect that enlisting might have upon his business. Vera directly attributed his lack of response to the call of King and Country to the fact that he had been educated at Manchester Grammar School, which, unlike Uppingham, had no Officers Training Corps. One day in early September, she observed Spafford pushing his mother in a bath chair through Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens. Contemplating ‘his obvious strength and suitability for military work’, she branded him ‘a shirker’, in the pages of her diary.

  Recounting to Roland Leighton the ‘domestic storms’ that it had been necessary to live through before Edward was allowed to enlist, Vera wrote that she had ‘persistently urged from the beginning of the war that Edward ou
ght at least to try for something’. Not, she quickly added, that she was ‘in the slightest degree a militarist’:

  But it seems to me that to refrain from fighting in a cause like this because you do not approve of warfare would be about as sensible as refusing to defend yourself against the attacks of a madman because you did not consider lunacy an enlightened or desirable condition.

  What Vera appears to be saying here is that, while she opposes war in general, she sees the European war of 1914, with its threat of a German aggressor seeking hegemony over the entire continent, as a particular case, necessitating special action.

  Three weeks into the war, at the end of August, Vera learned at last that she had reached the required standard in the Oxford Senior Local Examination, and that her exhibition at Somerville was consequently secure. Her pleasure at the news was immediately spoiled by her father’s reaction. It was no use her thinking of going to Oxford with a war on, he told her angrily, though Mr Brittain quickly appears to have reversed this decision, leaving Vera to tell Roland that he could hope to see her at Oxford that October.

  ‘You will go, won’t you?’, she asked him. It wasn’t simply the war that might stand in his way but also the family finances, which, as so often, were in a fairly precarious state. However, on 28 August Roland wrote to say that, with the help of a school-leaving exhibition of £30 a year, ‘I think I shall be able to manage it all right’, and that he looked forward to the three of them – Vera, Edward and himself – being together at Oxford.

  That dream soon faded. A month later, with the start of the academic year just ten days away, a letter from Roland admitted that he was no longer certain that he would be coming to Oxford. He had hopes, like Edward, and like Victor Richardson, their Uppingham friend, ‘of doing something of what now alone really counts’. A commission as a second lieutenant in the 4th Norfolks, despite his poor eyesight, now seemed a distinct possibility.