Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Could she ask the Leighton family to allow Roland to be portrayed on screen? And would George be able to preserve any vestige of the anonymity for which he had fought so hard if the book became a film? ‘… Just think what Hollywood might do with “T. of Y.”!’ Vera wrote to Winifred. But the film plans came to nothing. While Vera hesitated, the offer was withdrawn.

  In the late sixties, not long before her death, Vera made several attempts to interest television companies in Testament of Youth, encouraged by renewed television interest in the First World War. In 1966, Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling novel from the end of the twenties, A Farewell to Arms, based on the author’s wartime experiences of serving on the Italian Front, was dramatised by BBC Television. Two years later, R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–6), a sequence of novels largely taken up with life behind the lines, and exploring the theme ‘of what war does to civilised people’, was also adapted by the BBC as a four-part television series (interestingly, Mottram had trained in Peterborough with the 4th Norfolks, in early 1915, with Roland Leighton as his platoon commander).

  However, Vera’s efforts were to no avail. She did believe that ‘some day in the distant future when the First World War has really passed into history’ a new type of interest would arise in Testament of Youth. But she would not live long enough to see it.

  In November 1966, Vera was walking along Northumberland Avenue in central London on her way to give a talk at St Martin-in-the-Fields, when she stumbled in the dark and fell over some builders’ rubble. Although considerably shaken and in pain, she fulfilled her speaking engagement, and only subsequently discovered that she had broken her left arm and the little finger of her right hand.

  Her recovery was protracted and inconclusive. As the months passed, the mind that had once been so clear and resolute became clouded and uncertain, her memory faltered, and she dwelt for long periods in a silent world of her own. By early 1969, Vera was not only mentally confused but also physically very frail, and in January 1970 she entered a nursing home.

  Vera Brittain died at 15 Oakfield Road, Wimbledon, early on Easter Sunday, 29 March 1970. She was 76 years old, and the cause of death was recorded as cerebral vascular disease.

  In September that year, Vera’s ashes were scattered on her brother Edward’s grave at the small cemetery at Granezza, four thousand feet up on the Asiago Plateau in northern Italy.

  Television’s absence of enthusiasm for Testament of Youth was far from surprising. Throughout the course of the 1960s, as the First World War began to make an impact on popular history, the conflict was still viewed overwhelmingly as a masculine experience. This lack of acknowledgement of the wartime role of women was starkly demonstrated in 1964 – the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war – when BBC Television’s landmark documentary series, The Great War, devoted only minutes of its total running time of over seventeen hours to recounting women’s experiences.

  The fiftieth anniversary of the First World War brought recognition from The Times editor Sir William Haley (writing as Oliver Edwards), in a survey of the literature of the war, that Testament of Youth was ‘the real war book of the women of England’. But it was none the less a further four years before the BBC attempted to interview Vera about her war experiences, and by then it was already too late. In August 1968, arrangements were made to film an interview with Vera at Whitehall Court, her London flat, for the BBC Two series ‘Yesterday’s Witness’. Although her powers of recollection were by then seriously impaired, it was hoped that she might rally sufficiently to talk about her nursing experiences. However, she sadly struggled to remember anything. In response to a question about Roland, she replied: ‘Who is Roland?’

  Slowly, the notion that war was man’s business alone was being eroded. A shift in perspective away from the purely military sphere towards the beginnings of an understanding of how the First World War had affected wider aspects of British society – and women’s lives in particular – stemmed from the work of feminist critics and historians in the 1970s. But it was also heralded by the more populist medium of television. In 1974, the fourth series of Upstairs, Downstairs, London Weekend Television’s award-winning drama and ratings-winner – the superior progenitor of the twenty-first century’s Downton Abbey – portrayed the impact of the war on the women of the Bellamy household at 165 Eaton Place, both above and below stairs. Three years later, the Imperial War Museum in London mounted a major exhibition, ‘Women at War, 1914–18’, which ran for seven months to record attendances.

  The time seemed ripe for the reissue of Testament of Youth. A new feminist publishing house, Virago Press, with its distinctive apple logo, had been founded in Britain in 1973. Five years on, in 1978, Virago launched its Modern Classics list, dedicated to the rediscovery and celebration of women writers. At the same time, it began publishing a series of neglected non-fiction classics. Testament of Youth was to be among the first of these.

  Carmen Callil, one of the company’s founders, had been given a copy of the book by a member of Virago’s advisory committee, Rosalind Delmar, and had taken it with her to read while on holiday in her native Australia. Sitting, reading it, on Melbourne’s Elwood Beach, Callil was moved to tears, and returned to Britain determined to republish the book. In April 1978, Testament of Youth was reissued as a paperback under the Virago imprint, with an appropriately filial preface by Shirley Williams, at that time Secretary of State for Education in James Callaghan’s Labour Government of 1976–9.[ii] The simple cover design displayed the First World War’s most iconic image, a red poppy of remembrance set against a sombre black background. (Virago’s current critical edition of Testament of Youth, published in 2004, substituted for the poppy a picture of Vera Brittain in VAD uniform on the front cover, and placed a photograph of her war medals alongside a poppy on the back, to represent Vera’s active participation in the war as well as her more passive role as one of the bereaved.)

  Testament of Youth’s reappearance was widely welcomed. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the novelist P. D. James recalled its original appearance as ‘one of those books which help both form and define the mood of its time’. Many of the reviewers were at one in predicting that republication would find a new generation ready for the book, ‘for’, as one noted, it is a haunting autobiography that has no equal in World War I literature’. It quickly became one of Virago’s biggest selling titles.

  Not everyone was happy. At 80, living in the New Forest with his second wife, Delinda, Sir George Catlin (knighted by Harold Wilson for his work for Anglo-American relations) regretted the association of his late wife’s name with a company trading under the ‘deplorable title’ of Virago. ‘I have no interest in Viragos’, he wrote with a sweep of his pen, adding that the name carried ‘very misleading and damaging’ implications. The precise nature of these damaging implications became clearer a little later, in a further salvo: ‘I think it an extremely bad title (!!Lesbian)’. Recalling his battle, 45 years earlier, to ensure his anonymity in Vera’s description of their epistolary courtship and first meeting, Sir George insisted that on no account was his name to appear in the publicity for the book, or in any of the introductory material.[iii]

  ‘What a magnificent series this book would make for BBC TV’, ran an item in The Bookseller, in the wake of Testament of Youth’s republication. It would not be long before plans were afoot to bring Vera Brittain’s autobiography to the small screen.

  The enormously successful resurrection on television of Testament of Youth was largely due to the inspired efforts of five people, four of them women. Betty Willingale, script editor at the BBC, who specialised in finding suitable books for dramatisation on television, was determined that the project should go ahead. Jonathan Powell – the male interloper – a BBC producer, who numbered among his credits the recently acclaimed television adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was also very interested, becoming even more enthusiastic, according to one possibly apocryp
hal story, when he saw a rival producer reading the book at the Edinburgh Festival. (Testament of Youth was eventually co-produced with London Film Productions, the company founded by Sir Alexander Korda.)

  Once the plans had received a green light from the BBC, Willingale sent a copy of the book to Elaine Morgan, the first choice to write the scripts, suggesting that an adaptation in five parts (of 55 minutes each) might be a suitable length. Morgan, who had been writing television drama since the 1950s, knew of the book, but had never read it. In certain respects, she had some things in common with Vera Brittain: Morgan was a feminist and she had won an exhibition to read English at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall during the Second World War. But an identification between the two women should at once be qualified. Morgan’s feminism expressed itself through work which overturned male-centred ideas of human evolution, while she arrived at Oxford from a small village in Pontypridd, where her father worked as a coal miner (after university Morgan returned to live in the Welsh valleys for the rest of her life).

  Morgan remembered that in writing the five episodes, the first of which opened in Buxton in 1913, the length of the book and its rich and vivid detail were a great asset (drawing on years of experience, Morgan said that in scriptwriting it was much more difficult if the material was sparse and had to be filled in and expanded, especially if it dealt with real events where you were unable to invent additional episodes that might never have happened).

  Two problems presented themselves at the outset. One was Vera Brittain’s complete lack of humour, not necessarily the most compelling quality for a TV heroine, especially when it is essential to win audience sympathy for her. Morgan found Vera’s complete honesty about herself to be something of a compensation for this, especially in the final episode where Vera admits to being ‘horribly jealous’ after Winifred’s first novel is accepted by a publisher before hers. The other difficulty was how to convey the intensity of feeling present in the book simply by means of dialogue. Morgan recollected that it came as something of a breakthrough when she hit upon the idea of introducing voice-over quotations from the war poets – among them Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – at climactic points in the story.

  Shirley Williams was very concerned with accuracy, although Elaine Morgan remembered her querying the wounded Edward’s appearance at Vera’s hospital after the Battle of the Somme in episode three, saying that this was simply too much of a coincidence. ‘It had to be pointed out to her that there was no dramatic licence in this, and that it had actually happened!’

  Moira Armstrong, among the first women directors in British television, was hired as director. She had read the book at school, where it had made a great impression on her, partly because her own father, at 16, had enlisted in the army during the First World War by giving a false age. Cast in the role of Vera was Cheryl Campbell, one of the leading stage and television actors of her generation, recently seen as Eileen, the schoolmistress turned prostitute in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, tossing her Pre-Raphaelite tresses over Bob Hoskins while doing a quick strip to the strains of ‘Oh, You Nasty Man’.

  The series was shot on studio sets designed by Sally Hulke, and on location at Buxton, Uppingham School, Oxford, London (filming the exterior of the former First London General Hospital in Camberwell), and Malta (not at St George’s Bay, but at Mdina, the Città Vecchia, Malta’s old capital, which Vera Brittain had visited as a VAD).[iv] Geoffrey Burgon’s haunting title and incidental music – with its distant sound of ‘bugles calling from sad shires’, inspired by Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ – captured the elegiac mood perfectly, and made a significant contribution to the finished programmes.

  The first episode of Testament of Youth was broadcast on BBC Two on Sunday 4 November 1979; the final episode, five weeks later, on 2 December. The series was almost universally praised by critics and viewers alike. The Times thought that it stopped short ‘only of the miraculous’, while Clive James in the Observer marvelled at the writing, the directing and the acting, and wondered, tongue-in-cheek, whether it wasn’t all part of a vast conspiracy on the part of the BBC to make Shirley Williams Prime Minister (Williams’s successful BBC One talk show, Shirley Williams in Conversation, had just completed its run). The Radio Times received over a hundred letters in praise of Testament of Youth. ‘We know that we have seen something approaching perfection’, wrote two viewers from Cornwall; the programmes were ‘wonderfully moving’, according to Rachel L. Varcoe, who had gone up to Somerville as an undergraduate just after Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby went down; a Glasgow man, describing himself as ‘a combatant … in that war’ could find ‘no flaw in the action and settings for the period’. The series sent the book, in a new, mass market, edition published by Fontana in association with Virago, back to the top of the bestseller lists for the second time in just under half a century (Testament of Youth would be broadcast in the United States, in November 1980, as part of PBS’s ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ strand).

  Shirley Williams, similarly, received a flood of letters about the television adaptation of her mother’s work: from the war’s survivors, now upwards of 80 years in age, and from a new generation of young men and women, far distant from the events of the war, who attested to the way in which Vera Brittain’s story had moved and enthralled them. Among her letters was one from Maurice Richardson, Victor’s younger brother. A retired school teacher of 80, living in Scotland, Maurice was the last surviving individual to have known Uppingham’s ‘Three Musketeers’ well. His hero-worship of Edward Brittain as a recipient, like Victor, of the Military Cross, had led him in March 1918 to enlist in the Sherwood Foresters, although he arrived in France only days before the Armistice was signed. Maurice Richardson admired the BBC’s Testament of Youth, but he singled out for criticism one scene in the first episode, in which Roland, Victor and Edward are shown playing cricket. None of the ‘Three Musketeers’, he said, had enjoyed sport, and Victor had had a special hatred for cricket (as another Uppingham pupil of roughly the same period, the artist C. R. W. Nevinson, testified, one way of escaping ‘grim afternoons chasing a ball’, in the sports-dominated atmosphere of the school, was to join the Corps).

  For Shirley Williams, ‘it was a strange and peculiar feeling, suddenly meeting your mother in the form of an actress’. She was highly impressed, though, by Cheryl Campbell’s commitment to the role. ‘She had really worked her way into the character in a manner I had not expected’. There was ‘a defiant shyness about my mother which she fought to conquer, and Cheryl got that beautifully’. Cheryl Campbell received the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and Broadcasting Press Guild awards as Best Actress of 1979. The series itself won the BAFTA award for Best Drama of the year.

  Watching the BBC’s Testament of Youth today – it finally made its way onto DVD in 2010 – the modern viewer may be struck by how dated the studio set-ups appear, or by the way in which the length of many of the scenes, with their high proportion of dialogue, gives the impression of filmed theatre. Fine acting from the actors playing Roland, Edward, Victor and Geoffrey cannot disguise the fact that they are in some cases too old for their parts, depriving the characters and their situations of some of their poignancy (the decision to cast older actors as the schoolboy subalterns was an inevitable result of having the 29-year-old Cheryl Campbell in the main role).

  None the less, the intelligence of the writing – which avoids a slavish adaptation while successfully conveying the essence of the book – the beautifully judged, unobtrusive direction, and, most of all, Cheryl Campbell’s luminous central performance, combine to make Testament of Youth one of the outstanding achievements of television drama from the golden age of public service broadcasting (which I would define, no doubt a mite controversially, as having started in the late sixties, expiring some time around the mid-nineties).

  Ghostly soldiers, wearing steel Brodie helmets and dressed in muddy, blood-stained shreds of battled
ress, together with their spectral, sorrowing womenfolk in flimsy chiffon shrouds, dance to Francis Poulenc’s hymn to the glory of God, against the background of a shell-holed First World War battlefield.

  Gloria, a one-act ballet by Kenneth MacMillan, the leading ballet choreographer of his time, premièred at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in October 1980. MacMillan described it as ‘a lament and thanksgiving to the generation that perished in the 1914–18 War’. Throughout his career, MacMillan had wanted to create a ballet that would portray the consequences of war and the anguish of loss. The spur that ultimately allowed him to do this was Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. MacMillan had seen the BBC’s dramatisation in 1979 and had turned to the book as a consequence. On the opening page of the first chapter he found a poem by Vera, ‘The War Generation: Ave’, written in 1932 as she worked on her autobiography, which he later described as the starting-point for his ballet:

  In cities and in hamlets we were born,

  And little towns behind the van of time;

  A closing era mocked our guileless dawn

  With jingles of a military rhyme.

  But in that song we heard no warning chime,

  Nor visualised in hours benign and sweet

  The threatening woe that our adventurous feet

  Would starkly meet.

  Thus we began, amid the echoes blown

  Across our childhood from an earlier war,

  Too dim, too soon forgotten, to dethrone

  Those dreams of happiness we thought secure;

  While, imminent and fierce outside the door,

  Watching a generation grow to flower,

  The fate that held our youth within its power

  Waited its hour.

  The ballet has four principal characters: two soldiers and brothers-in-arms, and a pair of female companions, who represent the dual aspects of the central woman character – light hearted, and grieving. Writing about the 2014 Covent Garden production of Gloria, Rachel Beaumont observed that ‘[Vera] Brittain’s story is clearly represented in MacMillan’s choreography, through limpid pas de deux and an excoriating, intense pas de trois, where the central woman holds the two men close to her’.