2008 Vera Brittain: A Woman in Love and War, a BBC-TV drama-documentary, presented by Jo Brand, is broadcast on Remembrance Sunday, to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
2015 Release of the BBC Films/Heyday Films production of Testament of Youth, starring Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain and Kit Harington as Roland Leighton.
Gazetteer of Places Associated with Vera Brittain and Testament of Youth
ENGLAND
NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME, STAFFORDSHIRE
Atherstone House, 9 Sidmouth Avenue. This semi-detached villa, with a black and white frontage, was the birthplace of Vera Brittain in December 1893 (and is commemorated by a local plaque).
MACCLESFIELD, CHESHIRE
‘Glen Bank’, 170 Chester Road. The Brittain family moved from Newcastle-under-Lyme to this large, semi-detached house in the summer of 1895, and remained here for ten years. Edward Brittain was born at ‘Glen Bank’ in November 1895.
BUXTON, DERBYSHIRE
‘Melrose’, 151 The Park. The second Buxton home occupied by the Brittain family following their move to the town in 1905 (the first, High Leigh, was in Manchester Road). They took a lease on this ‘tall, grey, stone house’ in 1907 and stayed there until late 1915, when Mr Brittain retired early from the paper mill. Vera Brittain lived at ‘Melrose’ until October 1915, when she moved to London to begin nursing as a VAD nurse at the First London General Hospital in Camberwell. A blue plaque on the house, now divided into three flats, commemorates her time at ‘Melrose’ (though the plaque gives the wrong year – 1914 – for her departure).
The Town Hall. In January 1913, Vera Brittain began attending a course of University Extension Lectures given by John Marriott at the Town Hall. This led to her decision to try for Oxford University later that year.
St Peter’s Church, Fairfield. In 1913–14, Vera Brittain paid regular visits to this church at Fairfield, a small village to the east of Buxton, to listen to the sermons of the young Anglican curate, Joseph Harry Ward. On various occasions she was accompanied by her mother, Edward Brittain and Roland Leighton.
Devonshire Hospital. Converted in 1859 into a convalescent hospital from the Duke of Devonshire’s riding school and stables, the Devonshire possesses a circular area of half-an-acre covered by the world’s largest unsupported dome. Vera Brittain worked here as a nursing assistant from the end of June to the last week of September 1915.
Today the former hospital forms part of the University of Derby and of Buxton College.
Devonshire Hospital
Buxton War Memorial. Commemorating residents of the town who died in both World Wars, the memorial is to be found on The Slopes, a steep landscaped hill in the centre of Buxton, situated opposite the eighteenth-century Crescent. Edward Brittain’s is one of 314 names from the First World War.
RUTLAND
Uppingham School, Uppingham. The public school, founded in the sixteenth century, attended by Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson. Their names, together with those of 474 other Uppinghamians killed in the war, are listed on the walls of the school’s memorial chapel.
OXFORD
Somerville College, Woodstock Road. Founded in 1879, Somerville was one of the four women’s colleges of Oxford University in 1914. Vera Brittain went up to Somerville in October that year, occupying a room in the Maitland Building. At the beginning of Trinity (summer) Term 1915, she moved to a room at Micklem Hall, off St Aldate’s (now demolished and the site of the present day Campion Hall), following the War Office’s requisition of Somerville’s buildings as a military hospital. Half of Somerville was accommodated in the St Mary Hall Quadrangle at Oriel College, the rest in various ‘outhouses’.
A Brittain-Williams room, commemorating Vera Brittain, and associating her name with that of her daughter, the politician Shirley Williams, up at Somerville from 1948 to 1951, was opened at the college in November 2013.
Merton College, Merton Street. Although his enlistment in 1914 meant that Roland Leighton never studied at Merton, where he had been awarded a Senior Open Classical Postmastership, his name is one of those on the College’s War Memorial.
University College, High Street. Geoffrey Thurlow was an undergraduate at University College for a single term only, from October to December 1914, before he left Oxford to enlist. His name is on the War Memorial in the College Chapel.
CAMBRIDGE
Emmanuel College, St Andrew’s Street. But for the war, Victor Richardson would have studied medicine at Emmanuel College. His name is included on the College War Memorial.
LOWESTOFT
‘Heather Cliff’, Gunton Cliff, Lowestoft. The Leighton family home, to the north of the town, high up overlooking the North Sea, which Vera Brittain visited with Roland Leighton while he was on leave in August 1915. Originally the family’s summer home, it became their permanent base in 1913 after they gave up their London house at 40 Abbey Road, St John’s Wood. However, the Leightons did not remain at Lowestoft for much longer. In late 1915 they rented a cottage at 2 The Crescent, Keymer, Hassocks, West Sussex. It was at Keymer, in December 1915, that they received the news of Roland’s death, and where, in January 1916, they buried his uniform in the back garden.
A plaque on the east side of ‘Heather Cliff’ commemorates its association with Testament of Youth.
LONDON
St Pancras Station, Euston Road. Designed by George Gilbert Scott, and built in 1866–77 by the Midland Railway Company as its London terminus, this Gothic revival masterpiece was the place of reunion for Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton on his leave in August 1915. It also provided the setting, on 23 August, for their final farewell, as Roland saw Vera off on her train back to Buxton to resume her work at the Devonshire Hospital.
First London General Hospital, Cormont Road, Camberwell, SE5. The first military hospital at which Vera Brittain nursed, from October 1915 to August 1916. Among her patients was Edward Brittain, who arrived as a patient at Camberwell in July 1916 during the aftermath of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
The hospital was converted from a teachers’ training college called St Gabriel’s College for Ladies, while the neighbouring Cormont Secondary School served as a hospital for convalescent cases (the two buildings were connected by a long covered passage).
First London General Hospital, Camberwell
In December 1915, huts to accommodate a further 520 patients were erected in the park opposite, known as Myatt’s Fields Park. By 1917, the hospital contained 231 beds for officers and 1,038 for other ranks.
Today the main hospital building is St Gabriel’s Manor, an apartment block within a gated development.
Second London General Hospital, 552 King’s Road, Chelsea, SW10. This hospital, where Victor Richardson was cared for in the optical ward, and where he died in June 1917, was also originally a teachers’ training college, called St Mark’s College (an adjoining LCC secondary school formed the surgical section). A wall at the west side of the grounds was partially demolished to allow access to platforms at nearby Chelsea station, so that patients could be transferred from the ambulance trains directly to the hospital by the shortest and most private route.
From 1915, all patients with badly damaged eyes were sent to the Second London General (or, if it was full, to the Third London General, in Wandsworth). Staff from St Dunstan’s Hostel for Blinded Soldiers and Sailors visited blinded servicemen to help the newly-blind cope with the depression that generally followed the loss of sight.
Fishmongers’ Hall, London Bridge, EC4. Owned by one of the 12 ancient Great Livery Companies of the City of London, Fishmongers’ Hall was opened as a hospital for officers in October 1914. The Great Hall, with its gilded walls and ceiling, and the other apartments on the first floor of the building, were subdivided by wooden partitions to form cubicles. Each cubicle had a home-like atmosphere, with two armchairs, a reading table and an electric light. Patients were permitted to entertain two guests for afternoon tea. The hos
pital never had more than thirty beds.
Vera Brittain visited Geoffrey Thurlow here on three occasions in February and March 1916 while he was recovering from shell-shock and a slight face wound.
10 Oakwood Court, Kensington, W14. The flat, close to Kensington High Street, to which the Brittains moved in 1916 (after first settling in number 8, a larger one in the same block). It was here, on 22 June 1918, that Vera Brittain and her father received the telegram notifying them of Edward Brittain’s death in action on the Asiago Plateau on 15 June.
52 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, WC1. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby occupied a studio flat here, their first home together, from December 1921 to September 1922, at which point they moved to a more spacious top-floor flat at 58 Doughty Street, where a blue plaque commemorates their time at the address. In November 1923, they moved again to a large, unfurnished flat at 117 Wymering Mansions, Wymering Road, Maida Vale, W9 (a green Westminster City Council plaque marks Vera Brittain’s residence here). They continued to rent the flat until September 1927.
19 Glebe Place, Chelsea, SW3. Vera Brittain’s home from April 1930 to May 1937, where she lived with her husband George Catlin, their children John and Shirley, and Winifred Holtby. Most of Testament of Youth was written here, as were parts of Winifred Holtby’s final, posthumously published, novel, South Riding.
BRIGHTON AND HOVE, EAST SUSSEX
The Grand Hotel, Brighton. This opulent Victorian hotel, situated on Brighton’s seafront, was where Vera Brittain learned of Roland Leighton’s death, on 26 December 1915. He had died on 23 December after receiving gunshot wounds to his stomach during a night time inspection of the barbed wire in front of a trench a day earlier.
Hove (Old) Cemetery, Old Shoreham Road, Hove. Burial place of Victor Richardson (grave reference H.A. 56). Victor Richardson died on 9 June 1917 at the Second London General Hospital in Chelsea, from wounds sustained during the Battle of Arras on 9 April.
Victor Richardson’s name is on the Hove War Memorial in the entrance to the Public Library, 182–186 Church Street, Hove. His name is also commemorated on a plaque at the Richardson family’s parish church, St Barnabas, Sackville Road, Hove, alongside the names of the two other Uppingham musketeers, Roland Leighton and Edward Brittain.
ESSEX
Chigwell School, High Road, Chigwell. Geoffrey Thurlow is one of 79 former pupils of the school commemorated on its War Memorial (his older brother, John, killed on 24 April 1918 – almost a year to the day of Geoffrey’s death – is also commemorated here). The names of both brothers are inscribed on the lych gate War Memorial of their parish church, St John’s, Buckhurst Hill, and on their parents’ grave in the churchyard.
BELGIUM
Ploegsteert Wood. Known colloquially among British troops as ‘Plug Street Wood’. The small village of Ploegsteert, and its nearby wood, are two miles south of Armentières, eight miles south of Ypres, and close to the French border. On 17 April 1915, Roland Leighton’s battalion took over a stretch of trenches in Ploegsteert Wood, and remained there for almost three months, with periods out of the line. The British had wrested the area from German control in November 1914, though it was still subject to regular shell and rifle fire from the German lines, 70 to 180 yards away. It was here, on 25 April, that Roland completed his Villanelle, ‘Violets’, which he showed to Vera Brittain later that summer.
By the roadside today, adjacent to the wood, is an information panel giving the names of well-known people who served in this area. Roland Leighton is among them.
Ploegsteert Wood and Ploegsteert village
FRANCE
Louvencourt. A village 13 kilometres to the south-east of Doullens, on the road to Albert, on the Somme. The military cemetery, one of the first of three Commonwealth Graves Commission cemeteries to be built after the First World War, from a design by Sir Reginald Blomfield, is on the south-eastern side of the village. There are 151 Commonwealth burials of the First World War at Louvencourt, and 76 French war graves, dating from 1915 (the cemetery also contains three graves from the Second World War).
Roland Leighton’s grave is at Plot 1, Row B, Grave 20. His headstone, with its quotation from ‘Echoes XLII’, a short poem by W. E. Henley, gives Roland’s age as 19, although he was in fact 20.
Vera Brittain made two visits to Roland’s grave, on both occasions accompanied by Winifred Holtby, the first in October 1921, the second in the summer of 1933, shortly before the publication of Testament of Youth. Edward Brittain had visited the grave in April 1916, before the construction of the cemetery.
Louvencourt Church
The church, where Roland’s military funeral was held on 26 December 1915, is nearby. The eighteenth-century Chatêau de Louvencourt, a casualty clearing station in 1915, where Roland was operated on and died, is just to the north of the church.
Faubourg d’Amiens Cemetery, Boulevard de General de Gaulle, in the western part of the town of Arras, has a Memorial to the Missing. This includes Geoffrey Thurlow’s name (on Bay 7) as one of almost 35,000 servicemen from Great Britain, South Africa and New Zealand, who died in the Arras sector between the spring of 1916 and 7 August 1918, and have no known grave.
24 General Hospital, Etaples. Today, the vast Commonwealth military cemetery, to the north of the town, designed by Lutyens, and containing 10,771 burials from the First World War, covers part of the site of the British wartime hospital and reinforcement camp. The site of the 24 General, where Vera Brittain nursed from 1917–18, is to be found among a small group of modern houses in the Avenue du Blanc Pavé.
Etaples
MALTA
St George’s Hospital, St George’s Bay. The hospital where Vera Brittain nursed in 1916–17 was a converted British Army barracks (it reverted to its original purpose after the war). This was demolished some time after the Second World War. Today the bay is dominated by a modern hotel, but it is still possible to see remains of some of the barrack buildings and outhouses, which are currently in use as flats. The rocks on the seafront where Vera Brittain sat in April 1917, and decided to go home to marry Victor Richardson, are also clearly identifiable.
St George’s Hospital
ITALY
Granezza, a village 9 kilometres south of the town of Asiago in the commune of Lusiana, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. The British military cemetery is one of five cemeteries situated on the Asiago Plateau. It contains 142 First World War burials, including those of three unknown British soldiers.
Edward Brittain’s grave is at Plot 1, Row B, Grave 1.
Vera Brittain visited Edward’s grave, accompanied by Winifred Holtby, in September 1921, and again, in the summer of 1925, with George Catlin. In September 1970, five months after her death, Vera Brittain’s ashes were scattered on her brother’s grave.
Granezza Cenotaph
Further Reading
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925, first published in 1933, is available in a modern critical edition, with a preface by Shirley Williams and an introduction by Mark Bostridge, published in paperback by Virago, and in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
The published selections from Vera Brittain’s diaries and letters used throughout this book are:
Chronicle of Youth. War Diary 1913-1917, edited by Alan Bishop with Terry Smart (1981).
Letters from a Lost Generation. First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (1998).
The modern critical edition of Vera Brittain’s war poetry is:
Because You Died. Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After, edited and introduced by Mark Bostridge (2008).
Quotations from unpublished sections of the complete diary have been taken from the typed transcript of the diary in the Vera Brittain Collection at Somerville College, Oxford.
Unpublished letters and other manuscripts form part of the Vera Brittain Archive in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collec
tions at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
The standard biography of Vera Brittain is Vera Brittain: A Life by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge (1995), which includes a detailed bibliography. This may be usefully supplemented by Vera Brittain. A Feminist Life by Deborah Gorham (1996) which traces the development of Vera Brittain’s feminist beliefs, and has a number of interesting points to make about the ways in which the autobiographical account in Testament of Youth distorts Vera Brittain’s experience of the First World War.
Roland Leighton
Clare Leighton’s Tempestuous Petticoat. The Story of an Invincible Edwardian (1947) is a vivid portrait of her mother Marie Leighton and of the Leighton family. Marie Leighton’s Boy of My Heart, her posthumous memoir of Roland, published anonymously in 1916, can now be read online at https://archive.org/stream/boyofmyheart00newyrich/ (accessed 21 August 2014).
Harry Ricketts’s Strange Meetings. The Poets of the Great War (2010) has a useful chapter on the relationship between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton viewed mainly from the perspective of their poetry.
None That Go Return. Leighton, Brittain and Friends and the Lost Generation 1914-18 by Don Farr (2010) contains biographical minutiae relating to Roland, Edward, Victor and Geoffrey.
The Old Lie. The Great War and the Public School Ethos by Peter Parker (1987) is a good starting point for consideration of public school militarism in 1914. C. R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (1937), gives a jaundiced view of Uppingham School, where Nevinson was a pupil from 1904 to 1907 (he left early because of bullying).
Vera Brittain and the First World War Page 18