by Nigel Jones
Collectively, what all these books amount to is the presentation of a ‘new’ Brooke who is the almost complete antithesis of the sanitized super-schoolboy purveyed by Hassall and Keynes. The present book is an attempt to synthesize all this information – plus new material that I have turned up – and to give as balanced a judgement as possible on a mightily ill-balanced figure. I have been interested in Brooke since my own childhood, and the itch to discover what lay beneath the Peter Pan surface has never left me.
The legend burns on – I do not flatter myself that I have extinguished it – and it is clear that Brooke exercises the lasting appeal of a Keats or Shelley; poets whose youthful deaths in ‘some foreign field’ seem as potent as the verses they left behind. In an age that has witnessed a surge of renewed interest in the Great War, as it reaches its centenary, it seems likely that Brooke’s life and legend will loom still larger as he recedes into history. ‘The echoes …’ as Churchill prophesied, ‘will linger’ – though perhaps not in the way he had in mind.
Posterity may even prove kinder to the best of his poetry. His travel writing is vivid and leaps from the page even now, as do his letters – although not always for the right reasons. But even if neither his verse nor his prose ever returns to fashion, I believe Brooke will be remembered, like Byron, as a sexy star before his time. He was a more innocent Rimbaud, a fast-driving James Dean, a pre-rock Jim Morrison, who really did hope to die before he got old. As to why he told Ka: ‘It’s a good thing I die’ – let’s find out.
1
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Breathing English Air
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At 7.30 a.m. on 3 August 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, Mrs Ruth Mary Brooke, wife to William Parker Brooke, schoolmaster, was safely delivered of a baby boy at the couple’s home, 5 Hillmorton Road, Rugby, Warwickshire.
The sex of the child was something of a shock to Mrs Brooke. She had confidently anticipated the arrival of a girl, and what Mrs Brooke wanted she generally got. She had one son already, Richard, known as Dick in the family, born in 1881. A daughter, Edith Marjorie, followed in 1885, only to die the following June. The new baby, therefore, was fully intended to be a substitute for his recently dead sister; but alas, he was indisputably male.
Christopher Hassall, Brooke’s official biographer, believed that Rupert’s given names were derived respectively from his dull father’s choice of Prince Rupert, the dashing Royalist cavalry commander of the English Civil War; and from a Roundhead regicide ancestor of his mother named Chawner in the same conflict. Much speculation has been made – (not least by me in the original edition of this biography) – regarding the contradictions in Brooke’s character that may have derived from this split. However, recent research by the genealogist Graham Woodward (detailed on his website ‘The Genealogy and Family Tree of Charles Graham Woodward’) has clarified the issue. Both names come from Brooke’s maternal ancestors and were the choice of his forceful mother. He was named ‘Rupert’ after his great-grandfather, a distinguished eighteenth-century doctor, Rupert Chawner (1750–1836), who was himself descended from the regicide Thomas Chaloner (1595–1661). Chaloner, a judge at the trial of King Charles I, had signed the king’s death warrant and fled to the Netherlands on the 1660 Restoration, to avoid a trial and probably a painful death for High Treason. He died the following year of natural causes. The strongly puritanical side of Brooke’s nature can therefore be traced entirely to his mother’s forebears.
The paternal side of Brooke’s riven heritage can be traced back to the early sixteenth century and his most distinguished ancestor: Matthew Parker (1504–75). A Norwich-born tailor’s son, Parker successfully negotiated the murderous rapids of Tudor ecclesiastical politics. He rose from being private chaplain to the ill-fated Anne Boleyn to become Archbishop of Canterbury under her daughter, Elizabeth I. In this high office he skilfully presided over the Church of England’s decisive schism with Rome.
The Parkers continued to live in Norfolk as wealthy gentry until November 1761, when Matthew’s descendant John Parker, squire of Berry Hall, the family house at Great Walsingham, married off his daughter Anne to William Brooke from the nearby village of Geist.
The couple produced a daughter, also named Anne, who inherited Berry Hall while still a girl. The younger Anne, a woman of great wealth and status, married beneath herself in 1783 when she became the bride of a local farmer, John Reeve. At her parents’ insistence, the groom changed his name on marrying to John Reeve Brooke. Their son, another John, further improved the family’s economic standing and became a celebrated breeder of prize bulls. He married into another wealthy Norfolk family, the Englands. His bride, Ellen England Brooke, bore a son, Richard England Brooke, in 1821. Richard, the poet’s grandfather, became the first member of the family to venture on to a wider stage than Norfolk when he inaugurated the Brookes’ close connection with Cambridge University by graduating from Caius College and being ordained at Ripon in North Yorkshire in 1845.
The following year the Reverend Brooke married Harriet Hopkins, a Lincolnshire woman, and became Rural Dean at Hull (Brooke refers to ‘the sly shade of a Rural Dean’ in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’) before settling as Rector of Bath Abbey, where he was to remain for 20 years. The couple produced a typically Victorian brood of children – four sons and two daughters. The boys all attained academic distinction. The eldest, Alan, became Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, while the second son, William Parker Brooke, although outshone academically by his elder brother, achieved a solidly successful career as a public-school master.
William Parker Brooke was born at his father’s parsonage at Sowerby, Lincolnshire, in 1850. He was educated at Haileybury, in Hertfordshire, one of a new breed of public schools dedicated, after the example of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby, where Parker Brooke was to crown his career, to training the sons of Britain’s governing classes to rule both the Empire and their own restless inner selves with rods of iron. A quiet, conformist boy, with a withdrawn manner, Parker Brooke still had some steel in his soul, at least as a youngster.
Although his diminutive stature – he was just five feet three – made him a target of schoolboy bullying, he was not broken by the Spartan regime of Haileybury: on the contrary, he thrived there, and chose to spend the rest of his life within similar institutions. He became Head of School, captained the First XI at cricket and won the senior prizes in Latin and Greek. This distinction in the Classics earned him a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1869. After transferring to King’s College, he graduated in 1873, and was considered so brilliant that he was granted the signal honour of becoming the first King’s Fellow not to have been educated at Eton, King’s sister foundation. Provost Okes was less than effusive when welcoming the new Kingsman to the ranks of the Fellows, commenting sourly: ‘Let us hope that this new leaven will not leaven the whole lump.’ By this time Parker Brooke was used to swallowing such slights.
Freighted with high academic honours, Parker Brooke had no difficulty in obtaining a post as housemaster at Fettes, known as the ‘Scottish Eton’, when the recently founded Edinburgh school required a co-head for its School House. The new master found a congenial colleague in one of his fellow-housemasters who came from a similar clerical background. The Reverend Charles Clement Cotterill was a robust specimen of that peculiarly English limb of the Church Militant, a muscular Christian socialist, after the model of luminaries like Charles Kingsley and the great Thomas Arnold. Although the mild-mannered Brooke must have been shocked by some of Cotterill’s radical political views, he deferred to and respected his forceful new friend. Towering over Brooke physically and given to preaching his decided opinions in a harsh and grating voice, Cotterill was a naturally dominant man. Brooke was a natural follower.
Two years after Parker Brooke arrived at Fettes, Cotterill was joined at the school by his sister, Ruth Mary, who came to Edinburgh as a house matron to assist her bachelor brother in managing his responsibilities. Born in 1848, th
at year of European revolution, and hence two years older than her future husband, Ruth Mary Cotterill shared with him a Lincolnshire heritage, her father hailing from Brigg in that county. Also like Brooke, she was a child of the cloth. Her father, uncle and brother were all Anglican priests, and it was in her father’s parish in Stoke-on-Trent that she was born and brought up. She shared her brother’s domineering ways and many of his characteristics – including a commanding height, a harshly shrill voice and an imperious will. These, together with an extreme inquisitiveness, made her ideally suited to ferreting out the innermost secrets of the boys in her charge, and indeed of the little man who now, with characteristic caution and diffidence, began to lay siege to her armoured heart.
Ruth Mary Cotterill’s physique was as striking as her character. Tall and stately, she was proud of her looks: she had a retroussé nose and small but piercing eyes, with lids that drooped down at the sides. All these genetic traits were passed to her second son. From his father, Brooke was to inherit his blue eyes, though not the goggling look of the orbs themselves; his fair hair; and his clear, almost translucent skin – variously described as ‘pink’, ‘golden’ or ‘girlish’ – which, to its owner’s frequent humiliation, betrayed his confusion and embarrassment at moments of high stress by hectic blushes. In the years to come there would be much for Brooke to blush about.
William Parker Brooke’s courtship of Miss Cotterill, as befitted his conventional personality, was stealthy and prudent. It crept steadily forward until, in the spring of 1879, Miss Cotterill graciously consented to the announcement of their engagement. On 18 December of that year the couple were married in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. The ceremony was performed by the Bishop, Henry Cotterill, who was the bride’s uncle.
As there was no provision for married masters at Fettes, the school’s head, Dr Potts, a former assistant headmaster at Rugby, contacted that school’s headmaster, Dr Jex-Blake, and prevailed on him to give Parker Brooke, sight unseen, a job. The vacant post was that of Tutor at Rugby’s School Field House. A fortnight after their marriage, the newly-weds found themselves on the endless platform – the longest in Europe – of Rugby station, as they arrived in the small town where they were to spend the rest of their lives.
Rugby was dominated, both physically and culturally, by the looming mass of Rugby School, then enjoying its heyday as the standard-bearer of the English public-school ethos that was setting the standard for lesser institutions to imitate and emulate wherever British power and influence prevailed. Founded in 1667, and content over the centuries with its relative obscurity as a school where prosperous Midlands gentlemen and farmers sent their sons to acquire some social polish and a rudimentary Classical education, Rugby was transformed in 1828 with the appointment of Dr Thomas Arnold as headmaster.
From the moment he began to rule Rugby’s roost until his death in 1842, Arnold imposed his ideology upon the school with feverish energy, an iron will and a laser vision no less intense for the blinkered narrowness of its confines. He found the school a small, moribund, provincial backwater, and left it the most influential educational institution in Britain – and thus, at the height of Empire, of the world. A passionate Anglican – in an age when this was not a contradiction in terms – Arnold saw in the seething cities of industrial England merely ‘a mass of evil’ – a fetid swamp of sin awaiting a health-giving drainage, a spiritual sewage system. He resolved to transform Rugby into a nursery for turning out truly Christian gentlemen. His programme was summed up in his three ideals: first, religious and moral principle; second, gentlemanly conduct; and third, intellectual ability.
The ordering of these precepts is significant. In a break with tradition Arnold, an ordained priest, made himself school chaplain as well as headmaster – assuming the dual function of the school’s spiritual as well as worldly leader – and proclaiming his intention of making the school chapel the hub of Rugby’s life. ‘Gentlemanly conduct’ was instilled into the boys by a mixture of carrot and stick. Hoarse injunctions to beware of ‘beastliness’ were dinned into the boys during Arnold’s moralizing and seemingly eternal Sunday sermons. These, coupled with savage floggings administered to backsliders, soon made Rugby a stew of sanctimonious hypocrisy, heavy with the sentimental homoeroticism so familiar from the pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays – a brilliant piece of special pleading for the Arnoldian view of the universe.
Arnold’s vaunted ‘intellectual ability’ was in practice confined to screwing the rudiments of Greek and Latin into his reluctant charges. The subjects that were the real sinews of the Empire that the boys were being trained to build and rule – administration, industry and technology – were conspicuous by their absence from the school curriculum. As a result, the typical products of Rugby were long on religious repression, skilled at declaiming Horace or translating Homer, matchless at the game to which the school had given its name, but hopelessly under-equipped at dealing with their own emotions or the complex demands of the modern world.
It may not have been Arnold’s intention to send out his armies of young men with hearts of stone and heads of bone; muscle-bound flannelled fools and muddied, muddled oafs – but this was often the effect of his theories so ruthlessly applied. In one field, however, the good doctor could not be faulted: he was a brilliant propagandist. Works like Tom Brown’s Schooldays spread his message far and wide, and Rugby’s image became the model for an education seen by its admirers as the acme of civilized attainment. A whole crop of new schools sprang up, overtly dedicated to copying Arnold’s methods and results: Haileybury, Fettes, Lancing, Uppingham, Radley were all examples of the new breed; and older schools such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Westminster were forced to change their ways and conform to the Arnoldian model.
In the end, Arnold failed in his avowed mission to re-Christianize England. He was not able even to convert his own household. His son, the poet and educationalist Matthew Arnold, became one of the most influential sceptics of the late-Victorian era, hymning the ebbing of the ‘sea of faith’ with scarcely concealed glee. The rigid rules of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby were bound to produce their own reaction – and the life of Brooke, himself a quintessential product of the Rugby system, was to embody that reaction in all its terrible complexity.
The house where Mr and Mrs Brooke began their life at Rugby adjoined the school’s sweeping seventeen-acre Close, the legendary birthplace of Rugby football. Their home was a two-storey red-brick villa on the corner of Church Walk, with twin gables and a bow window on either side of the front door. It was a modestly comfortable dwelling for a schoolmaster and his burgeoning family: a small front garden and gate gave access to the pavement and the world beyond, and there was a tiny functional backyard. Here all the Brooke children were born, and here William Parker Brooke, much to his muted dismay, began to get the full measure of the formidable woman he had married.
Whatever his scholarly achievements, from the moment of his marriage William Parker Brooke became an ever dimmer presence in the life of his family, like a fading sepia print. Photographs show a miserable-looking man, with sad, flinching eyes and a face half-hidden by a luxuriant Nietzschean moustache. ‘Nor,’ as a biographer remarks, ‘was it hard to see from whom he was hiding.’ He developed eccentric habits, like taking his dog into classes, and – to the huge delight of the boys – he frequently jiggled coins and keys in his trouser pockets. The boys suspected him of playing what they called ‘pocket billiards’ and he acquired the indelible nickname ‘the Tooler’. His wife, by extension, became ‘Ma Tooler’.
The fact that ‘the Tooler’ was in thrall to his spouse was well known to the boys: her dominance was rumoured to extend to ordering her husband into the town’s streets by night to collect horse droppings to manure her garden. Even if apocryphal, this widely believed story sums up the nature of the Brookes’ marriage. There was little overt domestic discord in the household, however; if only because Parker Brooke accepted his subordinate position with at most a
n occasional muttered protest – ‘It is so, after all’ – after losing yet another battle of wills with his wife.
Parker Brooke retreated into himself. Henpecked and frustrated, he neglected his work, became increasingly absent-minded and dreamed of the man he might have been. The opinion of one of his pupils, Geoffrey Keynes, contemporary and devoted friend to Rupert, can serve as Parker Brooke’s epitaph: ‘He was a kindly man, but without any particular understanding of, or special sympathy with, the minds of adolescent boys, and my feelings towards him were and remained indifferent.’
Brooke himself shared the prevailing contempt for his father. In a letter to another faithful friend, Dudley Ward, written shortly before his father’s death in 1910, he described him as a ‘very pessimistic man, given to brooding, and without much inside to fall back on’.
No one could be indifferent to Mrs Brooke. She had, says Keynes, a ‘loud, harsh voice and an alarming manner. She had little sense of humour and seldom laughed … I quailed before her for several years, but in the end came to love her very dearly.’ Keynes’s devotion to Mrs Brooke’s memory is not so surprising. She had taken his side in his battle with another of Brooke’s admirers, Eddie Marsh, for possession of the dead poet’s literary estate. In the end, with her support Keynes succeeded in wresting Brooke’s papers from Marsh, in flagrant violation of the poet’s wishes. Writing from the ship taking him to his death, Brooke had specifically appointed Marsh as his literary executor.
Keynes and Marsh are at one, however, in agreeing on Mrs Brooke’s humourlessness: ‘How someone so without humour, and narrow to that degree, could have produced Rupert, is beyond me,’ an exasperated Marsh wrote after she had blocked publication of his innocuous memoir of Brooke for three years.
