Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  In 1895, the Brittains moved to ‘Glen Bank’, a large semi-detached house on the outskirts of the Cheshire silk town of Macclesfield, and it was here that Edward Harold Brittain was born, on 30 November. From an early age, an extraordinary bond existed between Vera and her brother, not quite two years her junior. It was based on their fundamentally different temperaments. She was volatile and inclined to be outspoken, characteristics belied by her outward appearance of vulnerable prettiness (an impression accentuated by her lack of height, as she grew to only five foot three inches). Edward was much calmer and more conciliatory, always ready to pour oil on troubled waters, counselling his sister to be less headstrong and confrontational in rows with their parents. In a childhood overseen by an affectionate governess but largely devoid of the company of other children, they formed a mutual dependence, broken only by their separation when they were sent away to boarding schools.

  In a strangely significant parallel, one other individual was to play a comparable role in Vera Brittain’s life, providing protective sympathy with at times critical, although seemingly unlimited, understanding, and that was Winifred Holtby, in the remarkable friendship that sprang up between the two women after they met each other at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919.

  But this ‘serene’ home background possessed one clear drawback for the young Vera Brittain. It was unbookish and unintellectual, and from an early age she began deliberately to define herself in opposition to it. Her father had attended school up to the age of 18, but had not gone on to university. Her mother’s education had been minimal. Vera later bemoaned the fact that the shelves at ‘Glen Bank’ were home to precisely nine books, including several of Mrs Henry Wood’s lachrymose romances, the complete poems of Longfellow and a copy of Household Medicine.

  Her own identity, practically as soon as she could hold a pen, was confirmed as a literary one. As an adult she claimed never to remember a time when it wasn’t her conscious intention to be a writer. Her governess constructed little notebooks out of waste-cuts brought home by Mr Brittain from the paper mill, and in these Vera wrote her five childhood ‘novels’. The stories all bear the influence of Victorian melodrama, are set in or around Macclesfield and are full of violent deaths and self-sacrificing heroines (usually bearing her mother’s name, Edith). Vera was a practised storyteller, regaling her brother Edward with bedtime stories centring on a mythological community known as ‘The Dicks’.

  Close as brother and sister were, the differences in the treatment meted out to them by their parents, and in the different expectations they had of them, must have made it obvious to Vera from childhood that a daughter would always be viewed as a second class citizen in comparison to a son. She loved Edward too dearly to resent him because of this, but the implication of female inferiority was one, nevertheless, that continued to rankle. At the beginning of her twenties, she recorded a conversation with her father in which she asked him if it wasn’t equally important that she, like her brother, should have a career:

  He answered very decidedly ‘No, Edward was the one who must be given an occupation & the means to provide for himself.’ The secondary sex again! It makes me feel angry that I, the more intellectual of the two, should be regarded in this light because I happen not to be a man. But I will show them. If Father though knowing me will not believe I have any value, the belief will be forced upon him by facts.

  Vera may have been both more intelligent and more imaginative than her brother, as well as more forceful – an aspect of her character recognised by Arthur Brittain, when, in a backhanded compliment, he nicknamed her ‘Jack’ – but her evident precocity did not lead to the overturning of basic assumptions about her education and future. When she was sent away from home, it would be to ‘good’ schools that emphasised her family’s social standing rather than demonstrated concerns about educational attainment. And in the longer term, as an attractive young woman from a well-off family, she would be expected to make a good marriage.

  As a boy, Edward’s position may have been more privileged, and his future taken more seriously, but to some extent he, too, was restricted by the constraints imposed by his gender. After public school and university, he would be expected to take the examinations for entry to the Indian Civil Service, or to start work in the family business. This would leave little room for the true passion of his life, his love of music. At school, he took up the violin and viola, as well as the piano and organ, and began to compose songs and short concertos. But music would not have been regarded by either of his parents as an appropriate occupation or future career for a ‘gentleman’.

  In 1905, when Vera was 11, the family left Macclesfield for the spa town of Buxton, in Derbyshire. The move signalled the Brittains’ social aspirations: Buxton, with its glorious new Opera House designed by Frank Matcham, its Pavilion Gardens and its elegant eighteenth-century Crescent, had an air of wealth and refinement together with a deep vein of provincial snobbery.

  Additionally, Buxton possessed a number of good day schools. Edward went to one of these in preparation for his first term at Uppingham School in Rutland, where he started as a boarder in the autumn term of 1908. Uppingham was a public school especially favoured by the families of middle-class industrialists. It was well-known for its music, but was also in the vanguard of public school militarism. There was a large and well-run Officers’ Training Corps, established during the South African War, which set the tone for other school activities. No boy, for instance, was allowed to take part in a sports contest, or be awarded a school prize, without first having passed a shooting test.

  In 1907, following two years at Buxton’s Grange School, which described itself as ‘a high-class school for the daughters of gentlemen’, Vera was sent to St Monica’s School in Kingswood, Surrey, where one of Edith Brittain’s sisters, the eldest, Florence Bervon, was co-headmistress. Aunt Florence had been a governess to a family in Stoke before setting up St Monica’s in partnership with Louise Heath-Jones, who had been an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and a teacher at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews.

  St Monica’s wasn’t on a par with St Leonard’s, nor, indeed, with still grander schools like Roedean or Benenden, and Vera only went there because of the family connection. But it was to prove a fortunate choice. Florence Bervon had neither academic qualifications nor training. She was largely responsible for administration, for teaching the girls social skills and for attracting the right kind of wealthy clientele to the school. Miss Heath-Jones, on the other hand, was much more progressive. She showed an enlightened attitude to the way certain subjects were taught, in particular history and scripture, and current events, where her pupils were given extracts from newspapers. Vera rapidly established herself at the top of the school. In her final year, lessons with a visiting mistress, Edith Fry, who encouraged her to read Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris and modern firebrands like H. G. Wells, strengthened Vera’s determination to be a writer. ‘[My] writing tends towards a purpose now’, she recorded portentously in her diary, ‘– I want to write, but I will not reveal what until the time shall come’.

  In a spur to Vera’s developing feminism, Louise Heath-Jones introduced her to the South African feminist Olive Schreiner’s pioneering work, Woman and Labour, not long after its publication in 1911. Schreiner’s declaration of equality with men, her message to women that ‘We take all labour for our province’, and her accompanying plea that women be given the training ‘which fits them for labour’, immediately struck a chord with Vera. Furthermore, in the summer of 1911, Miss Heath-Jones took Vera and other senior girls to a women’s suffrage meeting at Tadworth. It was of the milder, constitutionalist variety, free from associations with the militant campaigns of the Pankhursts and their supporters campaigning for the vote through arson and bomb attacks on public property. Nevertheless it was a daring move on Heath-Jones’s part, and one highly unlikely to have found any support from her pupils’ parents.

  Vera, circa 1912, dressed in he
r best clothes, perhaps for one of the Sunday Church parades in Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens.

  As she approached her eighteenth birthday, in December 1911, Vera prepared to leave St Monica’s and return to Buxton. Despite the ways in which she had been encouraged to think about women’s rights and the possibility of a wider, independent life, her immediate prospects were inextricably linked to making a good marriage with a suitable young man. She later claimed to have been fired with an ambition to go to university from the moment she discovered ‘that such places existed’. However, opportunities for higher education for women were still largely limited to those of their sex who were unlikely to marry and were therefore left to support themselves by teaching. Clearly, Vera was never going to fit into that category.

  In Woman and Labour, Olive Schreiner had reserved some of her fiercest criticism for the parasitical dependency of middle-class women on men. ‘Finely clad’ and ‘tenderly housed’, and deprived of intelligence or vitality, ‘the fine lady’, or female parasite, in Schreiner’s more savage term, contributes ‘nothing to the active and sustaining labours of her society’, and exists through the ‘passive performance of sex functions only’.

  It remained to be seen whether Vera would be able to find an alternative to the temptations offered by this conventional life.

  At first, Vera entered enthusiastically into the world of the provincial debutante. Returning home to ‘Melrose’, the Brittains’ large, imposing grey stone house in the select residential area of Buxton known as ‘The Park’, she quickly became immersed in a succession of balls and dances, ‘At Homes’, amateur theatricals, bridge and tennis parties, and the weekly Church Parades in the Pavilion Gardens, a prize opportunity to show off in one’s Sunday best.

  Vera made her debut at the High Peak Hunt Ball on 9 January 1912, in the ballroom of the Hydropathic Hotel. Newspaper reports of subsequent occasions over the course of the next two years often lavished praise on her choice of dress: for example, the ‘lovely gown of canary satin charmeuse with gold and jewelled embroidery over which was most gracefully draped sky-blue ninon’ she wore at the 1913 Cottage Hospital Ball.

  What sort of young woman was Vera Brittain at this time? In appearance, she was attractive: small, dark-haired, with striking, deep-set hazel eyes. In personality, she could be fun-loving, though she rarely showed any evidence of a sense of humour, and could be rigorously critical of others as well as of herself. Her schooldays at St Monica’s had been dominated by intense friendships with two other girls, one with Stella Sharp (who was later to nurse as a VAD with Vera in London and Malta), the other with Cora Stoop; but Vera tended to prefer the company of men.

  In the autumn of 1913, as she approached her twentieth birthday, Vera received her first proposal of marriage, from a young Buxton man named Bertram Spafford, nearly a decade older than she was, whom she subsequently condemned for his ‘limited brains and evangelical principles’. ‘My dear Vera’, he wrote, ‘The night I took you down to dinner at your house 16 months ago, I first knew I loved you – and since then you have been everything in the whole world to me … Is there the faintest chance of you caring for me even a little – and will you give me a chance of winning you … [?]’. Her response was terse, and exhibited a note of contempt. She had been ‘very sorry’ to receive his letter. ‘I cannot for a moment entertain the idea of your proposal, and I must beg you to consider this as final, as I have no doubt whatsoever of my feelings on the subject’.

  Even so, she did not completely discourage Spafford. She hung alluringly over the gate at ‘Melrose’ if she saw him in the vicinity of The Park, and continued to behave flirtatiously whenever they met. ‘To fall in love with him would be a perfect impossibility, but it is very easy to fall in love with love’, she admitted in her diary. ‘To hear a man’s voice say “you” in a tone which he uses to no one else on earth, is in itself a gigantic temptation to make him go on saying it like that … It is wrong … but then I am not good, & in spite of high purposes, only a very human girl’.

  Vera’s diary, which she had begun at school in 1910, had by now evolved into a more earnest ‘Reflective Record’. In it she reasserted her intention of becoming a writer and of recording ‘all the things, absurd, pathetic, interesting, original, humorous, satirical, that strike me as being useful for material’. The diary proved an outlet for her growing hatred of Buxton itself, which came to epitomise to Vera the mean, fault-finding spirit of the provincial town: inward-looking and narrowly class-regimented, in which everyone knew everyone else’s business and was unable to resist passing comment on it. She described her clashes with her father, who continued to ridicule her feminist beliefs, and portrayed her closeness to her mother – often united with Vera against the patriarch in the house – to an extent that will surprise readers of her later accounts, in which Edith Brittain is a more distant and sometimes less sympathetic or supportive figure.

  Throughout 1913 and 1914, Vera also used her diary to express her longing for a more meaningful existence, beyond the social whirl of parties and dances and other trivial pursuits. In some entries, the frivolous side of her character competes openly with the desire to be more serious and idealistic. She delighted in an afternoon’s bridge party with some neighbours, in February 1913, but then returned home to finish reading George Eliot’s Felix Holt, which filled her with a desire to imitate the young radical Holt by holding up ‘an ideal for humanity’. Vera bolstered her confidence with declarations of her own superiority – her determination to be an ‘exceptional & brilliant person’, for example, or her recognition that ‘I always come out top in the end, & I always shall’ – that need to be understood in the context of a home life in which her hopes and aspirations often failed to be taken seriously. And she wrote of her loneliness, in the absence of any companion of her own age and with Edward still at Uppingham during term time. This in turn increased her resolve to be more independent, and to ‘stand alone’.

  One drama that bulked large in her diary in 1913-14 – and was to provide the raw material, a decade later, for the least successful of Vera’s five published novels, Not Without Honour – was the controversy that had erupted over the views of a local rationalist clergyman, Joseph Ward. Ward was the young Anglican curate of St Peter’s Church, at Fairfield, a neighbouring village to Buxton. Vera had read Robert Elsmere, Mrs Humphry Ward’s late nineteenth century novel about a clergyman who rejects superstition and dogma in order to pursue a life of service among the poor in the East End of London; and Ward, who preached the social relevance of Christ’s teaching while rejecting traditional theology, appeared to her like a real-life Elsmere.

  In a sense the storm stirred up by Ward, who was denounced as subversive by his social betters – including Arthur Brittain – but looked upon as a spiritual leader by the poor of Fairfield, belonged to a bygone age. To Vera, however, the controversy reflected her own spiritual doubts about Christ’s divinity and the relevance of orthodox Christian doctrine, and she regularly walked the three miles to Fairfield for Ward’s services, sometimes in the company of her mother or Edward.

  The extent of her fascination and, at times, of her infatuation with Ward comes across clearly in diary entries. What additionally made Ward a significant influence on her was his support for Vera’s decision to attempt to win a place at Oxford University. She had begun to see college as perhaps the only means, outside marriage, of escaping from Buxton, though she worried initially that academia might prevent her from reaching her ultimate goal of becoming a writer.

  Vera in 1913, at about the time she started studying for Oxford University. ‘Oxford I trust may lead to something’, she wrote, ‘but Buxton never will.’

  Vera’s attendance together with her mother at a series of Oxford University Extension lectures, given by John Marriott at Buxton’s Town Hall in early 1913, encouraged her to take the idea of higher education seriously for the first time.[i] The award of a prize for one of her essays, and her visit to Oxford that August, cha
peroned by Aunt Florence and Miss Heath-Jones, to take part in the summer meeting of the University Extension Delegacy, finally led her to make a firm decision in Oxford’s favour and to start enquiring about a choice of college.

  She also managed to overcome any resistance from her father to paying the fees, and to funding the cost of the tuition necessary for the entrance exam. Indeed, if anyone had doubts about Vera’s course of action at this stage, it was not her parents but Vera herself, worrying about how easily Oxford women students could be identified with dowdy, spinsterish school teachers forced to earn their own living.

  Vera decided to try for Somerville College. Founded in 1879, Somerville, with its 150 students and dozen or so dons, possessed the highest intellectual standards of the four women’s colleges. A preliminary interview with the college’s Principal, Emily Penrose, to some extent confirmed Vera’s fears about academic dowdiness, when Miss Penrose widened her eyes in disapproval at Vera’s inappropriately ‘gay attire’, and in consequent ‘disbelief’ at her intellect. Vera was advised to read English, and on no account to try for the scholarship. However, after consulting Edward, who would himself before long win a place at New College for the Michaelmas Term of 1914, Vera decided to sit the scholarship anyway.

  In another complicated hurdle, she would in any case have to sit two exams: the college scholarship in March 1914, and the Oxford Senior Local for university entry that July. Setting to work, she studied intensively, working by herself, and in private lessons with the local crammer Mr Lace, taking time off only for a game of tennis or golf. Remarking on Buxton’s collective amazement at her decision to go to college, Vera observed that ‘In a small narrow place like this, one half thinks me too go-ahead for words, & the other absolutely mad & a perfect fool’.