Another obvious starting point was Edward’s commanding officer. In Richmond Reference Library, near where I lived, I located the entry for Brigadier C. E. Hudson, in the 1951–60 volume of Who Was Who. This revealed that Hudson had remained in the army after the war, becoming Chief Instructor at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and eventually, during the Second World War, A.D.C. to George VI. He had had one son, had died in 1959, and his address had been Denbury Manor in Devon. The book even helpfully gave his telephone number – Ipplepen 269 – though since he was dead that seemed, to put it mildly, somewhat superfluous.
Ipplepen 269. Over the next few weeks the number seared itself on my brain. I rang British Telecom on several occasions to see whether an operator could convert the number into its modern day equivalent, but, the harder I tried to explain what I was attempting to do, the more convoluted a muddle both the operator and I seemed to get into. Finally, I had almost decided to travel down to Devon to see if the house was still standing, when I had another idea. Hudson had been at Sherborne School. Wasn’t there a chance that he might have sent his son there too? Feeling slightly fainthearted now, I rang the Sherborne Old Boys Association, spoke to its secretary, and explained my predicament. He was doubtful about any prospect of success, but promised to do what he could. A week later, having forgotten all about it, I was just sitting down to dinner when I received a call from the secretary. My guess had been right. Hudson had sent his son to Sherborne, and he gave me the son’s telephone number.
I nervously rang the number. A woman answered, identifying herself as the son’s wife. I embarked on my story, but she stopped me after several sentences. ‘Good gracious’, she said. ‘We’ve been expecting someone to contact us about this for years.’
Hudson’s son couldn’t have been more open and helpful. As I struggled to contain my excitement, he told me that his father had recorded all that he knew about Edward’s death in his unpublished memoirs and that, of course, I was welcome to read them. ‘What a wonderful coup tracking down Hudson’s son’, Paul wrote to me when he heard the news. ‘That really is something.’ Looking at Paul’s letter as I write this, I see that it is dated 15 June 1989, the 71st anniversary of Edward’s death.
However, Hudson’s son did make one proviso. I must first obtain Shirley Williams’s permission before he could allow me to see the contents of his father’s book. This proved to be much more of an obstacle than I anticipated.
Shirley had been remarkably generous in answering my enquiries, and in allowing me access to material in her possession. But in this one instance she at first expressed her outright refusal to co-operate. She wasn’t at all sure that I should be allowed to delve further into the murky secrets of her uncle’s past. Hudson’s memoirs, she said, might only reveal Edward to have been involved in a love affair condemned by the bigotry and hypocrisy of the time; or they might show it be something discreditable, like the seduction of a young recruit by Edward as his junior officer.
I remember my feelings at the time as being ones of anger and frustration, during which I tried to enlist the support of other members of Vera Brittain’s family to speak up for my cause. ‘I’m really grieved and sad that you’re having so much trouble from Shirley over the Hudson book’, Paul wrote. ‘We – and especially you – have far too much to do and worry about without this sort of spanner in the works … I’m sure you’ve thought of all the arguments you can use. I do hope that you can get [Hudson’s son] on your side although I have a hunch that opposition only makes Shirley more determined.’
Looking back now, though, I see these events as much less clear-cut. As a biographer I had got hold of a good story which I wanted to milk for all its worth. It was as if I had been overcome by a kind of narrative greed, which paid no attention to the sensitivities of those more directly affected by possible revelations than I was. Much has been made of the ways in which a family can manipulate and bully an authorised biographer; too little has been said of the biographer’s ruthlessness in sometimes wilfully ignoring the family’s point of view.
In the event, it was Hudson’s son who came to my rescue. He was surprised by Shirley’s reaction, and had in any case only requested her permission as a courtesy to her. He was far more concerned with setting the record straight regarding the reputation of his father who, he believed, had been ‘grossly traduced’ by what Vera Brittain had written of him in Testament of Youth. After a couple of weeks, which I spent on tenterhooks, waiting for a final answer, we reached a compromise: Shirley would read the memoirs first in order to decide whether I should be allowed to see them.
So on a boiling hot July day, I made my way to Brooks’ Club in St James’s to meet Hudson’s son. Twenty minutes before my arrival, Shirley had departed, after agreeing that I could read his father’s book. In the staid, slightly incongruous atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club, the shocking circumstances of Edward Brittain’s death unfolded before my eyes.
On 12 June 1918, Edward’s commanding officer, Colonel Hudson, had received a communication from the Provost Marshal, the head of the Military Police, informing him that a letter written by one of his officers, while on leave, to another officer in the battalion, had been intercepted and censored at the Base. The contents of this letter made it plain that the two officers were involved in homosexual relations with men in their company. The more senior of the two was Captain Brittain. Hudson was instructed that he was to avoid letting the officers concerned know that they were under investigation.
But, according to Hudson’s later account, he was inclined to treat Edward more sympathetically, and on 14 June – the day before the Austrian offensive on the Asiago Plateau commenced – he had a conversation with Edward in which he gave him a warning. ‘I did not realize that letters written out here were censored at the Base.’ Edward turned white and made no comment. But it was clear that he had understood.
Edward was the only officer killed on 15 June. After the battle, Hudson had reached the terrible conclusion that, faced in all likelihood with the prospect of a court martial when they came out of the line, imprisonment and the subsequent disgrace that would ensue, Edward had either shot himself or deliberately courted death by presenting himself as an easy target for a sniper’s bullet. There were some striking discrepancies in the reports of Edward’s death: some described him as being shot by the enemy in full view of his men, others claimed that Edward had insisted on going ahead of the rest of his company, and that his body had only been discovered hours later, after the fighting was over, with a bullet through his head.
These disclosures, I knew from the McMaster letters, had understandably caused Vera Brittain some ‘very distressful hours’, though she had hastened to reassure Colonel Hudson that she did not believe that her brother would have taken his own life, or gone into battle seeking to be killed. Privately, though, she increasingly inclined to the opposite point of view, and dramatised the episode in her novel Honourable Estate. What was undeniable was that Edward’s final days must have been very bitter. It seemed such a terrible end, to have survived almost the entire war, with the loss of all his closest friends, to have served his country with courage and distinction; and then to have gone to his death in circumstances that, at the very least, must have been unendurable.
After submitting my typescript of Vera Brittain: A Life to Chatto in the summer of 1994, I decided to visit Edward’s grave at the British military cemetery at Granezza in Northern Italy, four thousand feet up in the mountains overlooking the Brenta Valley, on the highest corner of the Asiago Plateau. It was a fitting place at which to end my biographical journey. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, Shirley and her then husband, the philosopher Bernard Williams, accompanied by Paul Berry, had scattered Vera Brittain’s ashes on her brother’s grave. On my trip, Martin Taylor, a friend who worked at the Imperial War Museum in London, joined me. Martin had been extremely helpful in my researches into Vera Brittain’s First World War experiences. He was especially interested in the se
quence of events that had led to Edward’s death as, several years earlier, he had edited and published Lads, a highly praised selection of the love poetry of the trenches. It is a moving anthology of the homoerotic verse of the war, revealing the affection between fighting men that often went beyond the bounds of ordinary comradeship. Shortly before we’d set off to Italy, Martin had told me that he was HIV-positive. At night, in the stifling heat of our hotel room in the town of Bassano del Grappa, I watched as he removed his shirt, revealing the horrifying purplish-black lesions on his skin. And I recognised the truth behind Martin’s parting remark at the end of his introduction to Lads: ‘Though we may not have lived through the nightmares of the Western Front, we now have nightmares of our own …’. Edward Brittain had faced his nightmare, now Martin faced his. Two years later, Martin was dead, at 39.
We found the remains of the trenches, blown out of the rock, in which Edward and his company had spent their last hours before the battle, and then moved on to the grave. Raised sharply above the road, in a small natural amphitheatre, and surrounded by pinewoods climbing towards the skyline, the small cemetery contains the graves of 142 soldiers of the Great War, all of whom were killed during the decisive rout by British and Italian troops of the Austrian army in the summer of 1918.
Few visitors passed this spot. Apart from the cemetery, Granezza, in 1994, consisted of no more than a decaying mountain inn. Only the sound at lunchtimes of local farmers and their families enjoying their picnics at the gravesides punctuated the perpetual clanging of cattle bells.
Edward’s grave was quickly spotted. A white oblong headstone close to the thick rubble wall bears the simple inscription, ‘Captain Edward H. Brittain M.C. Notts & Derby Regiment. 15th June 1918. Aged 22’
We laid down the flowers we had brought with us, and returned to the road to catch the bus.
Chronology
1855 Thomas Brittain, Vera Brittain’s great-grandfather, purchases the Ivy House Paper Mill, in Hanley, North Staffordshire, which later combines with another Staffordshire paper mill at Cheddleton, in Leek, to form the company Brittains Limited.
1864 (Thomas) Arthur Brittain, Vera’s father, born.
1868 Edith Mary Bervon, Vera’s mother, born.
1891 (Thomas) Arthur Brittain and Edith Bervon married.
1893 (29 December) Birth of Vera Mary Brittain at Atherstone House, Sidmouth Avenue, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Staffordshire.
1895 (5 March) Birth of Geoffrey Robert Youngman Thurlow; (18 March) birth of Victor Richardson; (27 March) birth of Roland Aubrey Leighton; (30 November) birth of Edward Harold Brittain at ‘Glen Bank’, 170 Chester Road, Macclesfield, Cheshire.
1905 The Brittain family moves to Buxton, in Derbyshire.
1907 Vera is sent to St Monica’s School, Kingswood, Surrey.
1908 Edward starts at Uppingham School, Rutland.
1911 (December) Vera leaves St Monica’s and returns home to Buxton.
1913 (January) Vera begins attending John Marriott’s University Extension Lectures at Buxton; (June) Vera meets Roland Leighton for the first time at the Uppingham School ‘Old Boys’; (September) Vera rejects a proposal of marriage from Bertram Spafford; (November) Vera starts following the controversy at Fairfield concerning the Reverend Ward.
1914 (March) Vera is awarded an exhibition in English Literature by Somerville College, Oxford; (April) Roland stays with the Brittains at Buxton; (11 July) the Uppingham School Speech Day; (4 August) the outbreak of war; (September) Roland is acting recruitment officer at Lowestoft; (October) Vera goes up to Somerville; Roland enlists as a second lieutenant in the 4th Norfolks; (November) Edward is gazetted as a second lieutenant in the 10th Sherwood Foresters, Victor in the 4th Sussex Regiment; (30–31 December) Vera meets Roland in London.
1915 (January) Geoffrey leaves University College, Oxford, after a term, to enlist as a second lieutenant in the 10th Sherwood Foresters; (March) Roland visits Vera at Buxton before leaving for the Front with the 7th Worcesters; (June) Vera takes Pass Mods before going down from Oxford in order to nurse as an auxiliary at Buxton’s Devonshire Hospital; (18–27 August) Roland on leave in England; (October) Vera begins nursing as a VAD at the First London General Hospital in Camberwell; (November) Geoffrey goes to the Front with the 10th Sherwood Foresters; (22–23 December) Roland is wounded while leading an expedition to repair the barbed wire in front of trenches at Hébuterne, and dies at the Casualty Clearing Station at Louvencourt; (26 December) at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, Vera learns of Roland’s death while waiting for him to come home on leave.
1916 (February) Edward departs for the Front with the 11th Sherwood Foresters; Geoffrey suffers shell shock and a face wound during heavy bombardment at Ypres; (February–March) Vera visits Geoffrey in hospital at Fishmongers’ Hall at London Bridge; (June) Edward returns to England on leave and warns of a pending great battle; (1 July) Edward is wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme leading the first wave of his company’s attack, and is sent to Vera’s hospital at Camberwell; (August) Geoffrey returns to France; Edward is awarded the Military Cross; (24 September–6 October) Vera sails to Malta to nurse at St George’s Hospital; (late September) Victor transfers to the 9th King’s Royal Rifles and leaves for France.
1917 (9 April) Victor is badly wounded during an attack at Arras and (19 April) arrives in England for treatment at the Second London General Hospital in Chelsea; (23 April) Geoffrey is killed in action at Monchy-le-Preux; (1 May) Vera in Malta receives two cablegrams from England, the first tells her that Victor’s sight is gone, the second informs her of Geoffrey’s death; (28 May) Vera arrives back in England; (9 June) Victor dies in hospital and is buried at Hove; (30 June) Edward returns to the Front; (August) Vera begins nursing at the 24 General at Etaples; (November) Edward is posted, with the 11th Sherwood Foresters, to the Italian Front in northern Italy.
1918 (January) Vera and Edward on leave together in London; (March–April) Vera nurses at Etaples during Ludendorff’s great offensive; (end of April) Vera returns home to Oakwood Court to care for her parents; (15 June) Edward is killed in action during a counter-attack against the Austrian Offensive on the Asiago Plateau; (22 June) Vera and her father receive the telegram containing the news of Edward’s death; (August) Vera’s first book, Verses of a V.A.D., is published by Erskine Macdonald; (11 November) Vera is working as a VAD in London, at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital on Millbank, when the Armistice is declared.
1919 (end of April) Vera returns to Somerville College, Oxford, and changes subject to history; (October) Vera meets Winifred Holtby at a shared tutorial with the Dean of Hertford.
1921 (August–September) Vera and Winifred spend six weeks together in Italy and France after leaving Oxford, and visit Edward’s grave at Granezza, and Roland’s at Louvencourt; (December) Vera and Winifred move into a studio flat at 52 Doughty Street in London.
1922 Vera enters an edited version of her war diary, ‘A Chronicle of Youth’, in a publisher’s competition for the best diary or autobiography. The diary is not chosen.
1923 Vera’s first novel, The Dark Tide, is published in Britain by Grant Richards.
1925 (27 June) Vera marries George Catlin at St James’s, Spanish Place, London.
1927 (December) John Edward Jocelyn Brittain-Catlin is born.
1929 (November) Vera begins writing Testament of Youth.
1930 (July) Shirley Vivian Brittain-Catlin is born.
1933 (February) Vera finishes writing Testament of Youth; (28 August) Testament of Youth is published in Britain by Gollancz; (October) the book is published by Macmillan in the United States.
1935 (August) Arthur Brittain, Vera’s father, commits suicide in London by drowning; (29 September) Winifred Holtby dies in a nursing home in London from Bright’s disease.
1937 (January) Vera becomes a sponsor of the pacifist organisation, the Peace Pledge Union.
1940 (January) Testament of Friendship, Vera’s biography of Winifred Holtby, is publishe
d in Britain by Macmillan.
1944 Seed of Chaos. What Mass Bombing Really Means, Vera’s appeal against the Allies’ saturation bombing of German cities, is published in Britain by the Bombing Restriction Committee. The American edition, under the title Massacre by Bombing, provokes widespread attacks against Vera throughout the United States.
1957 Testament of Experience, Vera’s autobiographical sequel to Testament of Youth, covering the years 1925 to 1950, is published in Britain by Gollancz.
1970 (29 March) Vera dies in a nursing home at 15 Oakwood Road, Wimbledon; (September) Vera’s ashes are scattered on her brother Edward’s grave at Granezza in northern Italy.
1978 (April) Testament of Youth is reissued by Virago Press.
1979 (7 February) Death of Sir George Catlin; (November–December) the first broadcast, on BBC Two, of Elaine Morgan’s five-part television adaptation of Testament of Youth, starring Cheryl Campbell as Vera Brittain (the series is repeated on BBC One the following August, and, later, on BBC Two in October 1992, as part of a ‘War and Peace’ season).
1980 (October) The first performance, at London’s Covent Garden, of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Gloria, to music by Francis Poulenc. The ballet is inspired by Testament of Youth, particularly the book’s opening poem, ‘The War Generation: Ave’, written by Vera Brittain in 1932.
1981 Chronicle of Youth, a selection from Vera Brittain’s First World War diary, edited by Alan Bishop, is published in Britain by Gollancz.
1995 Vera Brittain: A Life, the authorised biography by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, is published in Britain by Chatto & Windus.
1998 Letters from a Lost Generation, a selection of the First World War Letters of Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, is published in Britain by Little, Brown to mark the 80th anniversary of the Armistice. An adaptation of the Letters in 15 episodes by Mark Bostridge, starring Amanda Root as Vera Brittain and Rupert Graves as Roland Leighton, is broadcast on BBC Radio Four.
Vera Brittain and the First World War Page 17
