̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - First World War

USA sexually ‘teased’ its troops in WWI to make them fight harder

ta385 — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��United States Government sought to sexually stimulate then frustrate its soldiers to prepare them for an unpopular conflict in Europe, a Cambridge historian argues.

Diaries of Captain Scott's widow secured by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

sjr81 — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 16:30:26 +0000

Kathleen Scott, the sculptor and widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, married journalist and politician Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet, in 1922. Her papers include diaries covering a period of over 35 years, records of her sculpture and exhibitions as well as other writings. These include a major series of significant letters from some of the most distinguished and powerful politicans, writers, artists and explorers of her generation.

Of particular importance are the papers and letters relating to her first husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Together with her diaries covering the period of Scott's last Antarctic expedition, the material is of the utmost interest for our understanding of the legendary explorer.

̽��ֱ��papers also reflect the fascinating careers, interests and connections of Lord and Lady Kennet and are of importance for the study of British military and political history, as well as of literary and cultural attitudes and concerns during the first half of the 20th century.

Edward Hilton Young was a British politician and writer. He embarked on a career in financial journalism, working for various papers including ̽��ֱ��Economist and the Morning Post prior to serving for the Royal Navy in World War One, where he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Service Cross.

He entered Parliament in 1915 as a Liberal MP, becoming Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1921. After the 1922 election, he became Chief Whip for Lloyd George's Liberal Party and in 1926 joined the Conservatives, serving as Minister for Export Credits and then as Minister of Health. In 1935, Hilton Young accepted a peerage as Lord Kennet of the Dene. ̽��ֱ��archive at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library includes his wartime diaries and logbooks and his political papers and correspondence.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “It’s a particular pleasure, as we celebrate our 600th Anniversary, to welcome this exceptional archive to the ̽��ֱ�� Library. Lord and Lady Kennet led fascinating lives and these papers will be of great interest to researchers.”

Also accepted were the papers of Wayland Hilton Young, 2nd Baron Kennet (1923-2009) which have been allocated to ̽��ֱ��Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College.

Wayland Young’s papers detail his political career in both the Labour and Social Democratic parties. ̽��ֱ��files include working drafts, fragments of memoirs, notes for speeches and articles, and substantial correspondence and papers for Europe Plus Thirty, the EEC project he chaired in 1974-1975 forecasting how Europe would look in 30 years.

Allen Packwood, Director of ̽��ֱ��Churchill Archives Centre, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Churchill Archives Centre holds the personal papers of figures from across the political spectrum, and is pleased to offer a home to Wayland Young, who was an independent thinker and a lifelong campaigner.”

̽��ֱ��acceptance of the collected material settled £402,500 of tax. ̽��ֱ��Acceptance in Lieu scheme is administered by the Arts Council. ̽��ֱ��Acceptance in Lieu Panel, chaired by Edward Harley, advises Ministers on whether property offered in lieu is of suitable importance, offered at a value which is fair to both nation and taxpayer and whether an allocation wish or condition is appropriate. AIL enables taxpayers to pay inheritance tax by transferring important works of art and other important heritage objects into public ownership. ̽��ֱ��taxpayer is given the full open market value of the item, which then becomes the property of a public museum, archive or library. In the last decade the scheme has bought over £250m of cultural property into public collections.

̽��ֱ��diaries of Captain Scott’s widow – and the papers of her second husband, Lord Kennet – will be made accessible to researchers at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library following their acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax.

Lord and Lady Kennet led fascinating lives and these papers will be of great interest to researchers.

Anne Jarvis

̽��ֱ��National Library of New Zealand

Kathleen Scott pictured with her husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott, 1910

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A conflict of Biblical proportions: How the Bible was used to turn the First World War into a Holy War

tdk25 — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 06:00:44 +0000

Amid the mud and mechanised slaughter, it is difficult to see how the teachings of the Good Book could have been much more than an afterthought for those who lived and fought through the horrors of the First World War.

Yet as a new research project aims to reveal, the Bible may have done far more to shape popular perception of the war than has previously been appreciated. Starting this week, researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will embark on a centenary study examining how the Bible played an influential role in the deadliest armed struggle that the world had, at that stage, ever seen.

Over the next two years, an international network of academics in various disciplines including history, literature and theology will attempt to piece together an aspect of the conflict that remains broadly overlooked, showing how the supposed word of God was widely employed both to support and oppose war efforts on both sides.

Among other themes, the research will explore the Bible’s role as inspiration for soldiers, a device for swaying public opinion, a foundation for conscientious objection, and as a text so important that German theologians debated whether the Bible was sufficiently bloodthirsty to be given out to the troops.

Entitled “ ̽��ֱ��Book And ̽��ֱ��Sword: ̽��ֱ��Bible in the Experience and Legacy of the Great War”, the project will consist of three workshops being held in Cambridge and Ludwig Maximilian ̽��ֱ�� of Munich as well as events engaging the public and church leaders with various partner organizations including St Paul’s Cathedral and Westcott House, an Anglican Theological College affiliated to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��project is being carried out in the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Divinity by Andrew Mein, a senior researcher at Westcott House and Nathan MacDonald, an Old Testament lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� and a Fellow of St John's College.

Researchers argue that the Bible represents something of a “blind spot” in academic and popular understanding of the Great War, its legacy, and in particular of the terms in which the war would have been seen at the time. Religious instruction was still a core part of the education of many of those who fought, and soldiers and civilians alike were still widely familiar with scripture. In Britain, Bible Society printing presses went into overdrive in 1914 as efforts were made to satisfy the demand for personal copies among troops departing for the front.

Dr Nathan MacDonald, the project’s co-lead, said: “It is difficult to remember just how suffused the culture of the Edwardian Era was in the language of the Bible. ̽��ֱ��Bible was hidden in plain sight. If you left school at 12 or 14 you probably knew the Bible better than many theology students now. Many people could quote it with ease.

“Politicians and church leaders could appeal to that cultural world and use it to influence popular sentiment. It led to a sense on both sides that the conflict was in some sense a Holy War.”

̽��ֱ��religious resonance with which aspects of the war were fought is perhaps most obvious in the Sinai and Palestine campaign, in which the British ultimately defeated a German-supported Ottoman army. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that for the Christian nations involved, this was seen as a battle for their own people’s hearts and minds, with both sides keen to present success in the Holy Land as symbolic of a righteous cause.

Germany, for example, sent a battalion to the Middle East charged with protecting monuments and claiming inheritance to the world described in the Bible, including in its number the theologian Albrecht Alt. When, in December 1917 General Edmund Allenby became the first Christian to capture Jerusalem for centuries, he deliberately entered the Old City on foot, taking his cue from the description of Jesus’ humility in the Bible. ̽��ֱ��Prime Minister, David Lloyd George described the victory as “a Christmas present for the British people”.

More broadly, the Bible was an essential tool of the propaganda war. British publications depicted the Germans as “Philistines” and as a modern-day Assyria sweeping down on Israel. ̽��ֱ��Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, whose jingoism periodically offended leaders on even his own side, proclaimed a “great crusade to defend the weak against the strong”. Motivational sermons by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dean of Westminster, and other religious leaders, were printed in national newspapers.

̽��ֱ��use of the Bible is particularly evident in the German context, however, where a debate erupted over whether soldiers should be allowed access to it at all. Some academics feared that, with its peace-loving message, the text would weaken soldiers’ will, but their opinions were successfully countered by a school of thought which argued that the Bible persuasively encouraged violence for a cause.

As this implies, one of the project’s main contentions is that the Bible was used on both sides as a “mirror” in which any claim (or counter-claim) could be seen reflected. Many conscientious objectors, for example, refused to fight on religious grounds, and often found themselves before tribunals at which they were grilled on their Biblical knowledge by Church officials.

̽��ֱ��project will also examine how the First World War changed the way in which people treated the Bible. For some, the conflict destroyed any belief in God; but for others it represented the apocalypse as foretold. During the war interest in the Book of Revelation and its apocalyptic prophecies soared.

Opinion also evolved within the Church. ̽��ֱ��German-based scholar, Alfred Bertholet, argued that war had enabled Biblical concepts such as divine vengeance to be appreciated with deeper resonance by those who had survived. Meanwhile, Karl Barth, deploring the way his teachers in Berlin had used the Bible to support the war effort released a revised commentary on the Book of Romans, which laid the foundations for what became known as “neo-orthodoxy”, and for much 20th Century Christian thought.

“ ̽��ֱ��Bible is an inescapable part of the cultural and religious landscape of World War I,” Dr Andrew Mein, the project’s leader, said. “It was perhaps the single most widely-read book during the war, offering inspiration, challenge and consolation to soldiers and civilians alike.”

MacDonald added: “In some ways we treat the idea that scripture can be used as the basis of a holy war as primitive and medieval. We like to think that it applies more to fanatical organisations in the Middle East than our own modern history. Actually, it is part of our recent history. ̽��ֱ��Bible was being used for self-justification by opposing sides in Europe just a century ago.”

“ ̽��ֱ��Book And ̽��ֱ��Sword” is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Additional image: Army Chaplain tending British graves, from a Daily Mail Official War Photograph, reproduced via Wikimedia Commons.

̽��ֱ��significance of the Bible in the war, and anti-war efforts, of both Allied and Central powers in the First World War are to be examined in a new research project, which will document ways in which scripture was used to create notions of a Holy War, and how views of the Bible changed as a result of the conflict.

In some ways we treat the idea that scripture can be used as the basis of a holy war as primitive and medieval. Actually, the Bible was being used for self-justification by opposing sides in Europe just a century ago

Nathan MacDonald

A Photographic History of the World War, via Wikimedia Commons

General Sir Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem in December 1917. ̽��ֱ��widely-circulated image of him entering the Old City on foot conjured up images of Christ-like humility in the Bible in a calculated attempt to win over hearts and minds.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Too big to cry: when war ended, the damage began

amb206 — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 10:00:00 +0000

When we think of the First World War, we remember the many millions of men who died. But, as dangerous it was to be a soldier in the horror of the trenches, it was more dangerous to be a baby back at home. This parlous state of affairs was described by the Bishop of London at the launch of an initiative called Baby Week designed to improve infant survival rates: “100,000 babies died during the first twelve months from their birth… While nine soldiers died every hour in 1915 twelve babies died each hour.”

This bleak picture, and the urgent efforts made to redress it, is one backdrop to ̽��ֱ��Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice a collection of essays edited by Cambridge academics Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy. ̽��ֱ��book, which comes out in paperback on Armistice Day (11 November 2015) looks at the cultural and societal narrative of a Britain struggling to find itself in the wake of conflict. Part of this struggle was a national drive to increase the health of the nation and produce a generation raised on safe milk, housed in sanitary conditions and provided with a secure framework.

̽��ֱ��book explores how selected writers, artists and composers sought to bear witness to the war and the disappointment of peace. It’s one of the few volumes to look comparatively at British, German and Austrian sources, reading Virginia Woolf alongside Arthur Schnitzler and Alfred Döblin, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Krenek alongside Arthur Bliss, Elizabeth Bowen and Ford Madox Ford, and unpublished letters by both German and British soldiers. Contributors include Andrew Frayn, Alison Hennegan, Klaus Hofmann, Jane Potter, George Simmers, and Alexander Watson. Adrian Barlow discusses British and German war memorials.

Both Tate and Kennedy study the First World War but neither is a historian in the conventional sense. Tate is a specialist in the literature of conflict and Kennedy is a biographer with an interest in the relationship between words and music. ̽��ֱ��essays they bring together in Silent Morning look behind the practical measures taken to improve hygiene and housing to reveal the deeper cultural forces at work. Evident in art, literature and music, these ways of seeing the world shaped much more than government policies: they had a profound and enduring impact on people’s lives on both sides of the conflict.

̽��ֱ��chapter in Silent Morning contributed by Tate is titled ‘King Baby’. It covers new ground in its analysis of underlying attitudes to child development and how these were shaped by the not-quite peace that unfolded when an Armistice was declared in November 1918. In her exploration of the literature of the period, Tate focuses first and foremost on babies. Her journey into the unconscious of the domestic sphere embraces the work of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield as well as the manuals that exerted strong influences on childcare practice.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised. She reminds us that war traumatises – but also that peace, and the absence of the sound of guns, can be traumatic too. ̽��ֱ��uncertain and sullied cease of conflict that followed was described by the poet Eleanor Farjeon in chilling terms:

I am awful as my brother War,
I am the sudden silence after clamour.
I am the face that shows the seamy scar
When blood has lost its frenzy and its glamour.

When Woolf too describes the disappointment of peace, she turns to childhood as her point of reference. ̽��ֱ��build-up to Armistice is like the excitement of a birthday. Inevitably, the day itself disappoints yet the charade that everything’s lovely has to be maintained. “So on a birthday,” she writes, “when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed.”

Rather than returning as heroes, many men who came back from the First World War were broken and stripped of individual agency. Some were empty and angry; some could be violent. Many of those who went to war never came back. Bowen’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ describes a young widow, Mrs Dickinson, containing her grief for her dead husband Toppy beneath a mask of elegance and poise. ̽��ֱ��Dickinsons’ seven-year-old son, Frederick, who had been just a baby when his father died, cries and cries. His mother is embarrassed by this “great blubbering boy” who is “too big to cry”.

Perhaps poor Frederick had been raised according to the method set out by Truby King, a pioneer in modern parenting. Enthusiastically embraced in the wake of the First World War, King’s views made a perfect partner for the nationwide programmes (such as Baby Week) aimed at raising standards of hygiene and nutrition.

King recommended a strict, and largely loveless, schedule. An extraordinary man, whose career took in dairy farming and the cultivation of roses, King was also superintendent of a lunatic asylum. He observed that calves thrived when they were fed regularly. Babies, believed King, should be fed every four hours (not at night) with sleep in between. Even their bowel movements should be regulated. Over-stimulation (too much play and excitement) was to be avoided; physical contact was spoiling.

When the guns went silent, and a semblance of normality crept into the lives of those who had survived the war, a gaping absence asserted itself. “Babies born after the Armistice come into what seems like a formless, unpredictable world,” writes Tate. “In the many families which take up the Truby King method, babies’ tiny lives are vigorously regulated, thus providing a comforting structure – a ‘container’ which at least makes the adults feel more secure.”

A caption below a photo of two bonny girls in King’s book ̽��ֱ��Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Month reads: “A doctor’s children. Healthy, hardy, happy little girls, aged two and nearly four years. Good jaws and sound teeth. Nursed four-hourly from birth – never more than five times in twenty-four hours; plenty of fresh air and exercise – never any coddling.”

By mechanising babies, and raising them in a sterile environment, parents perhaps tried to make the world secure for themselves. King’s literature on the best way to bring up baby was devoured by many of the professionals seeking to improve the nation’s health. His methods were ‘scientific’. A new generation of maternity nurses was trained in the ‘Truby King method’. ̽��ֱ��Plunket nurses (named after King’s patrons Lord and Lady Plunket) helped mothers to breastfeed and guided them through their babies’ early development. Plunket nurses adhered to routine; they wouldn’t ‘give in’ to a crying child.

Tate shows how Mansfield captures the cruel effects of this detached style of parenting in her short story ‘Bliss’. Bertha is a middle class mother who employs a full-time nanny. Her husband boasts of his lack of interest in his child. “Don’t ask me about my baby. I never see her.” When Bertha visits her daughter one evening, the child is delighted while nanny experiences the unscheduled visit as a disruption to a regime that must be maintained at all costs. Bertha suddenly realises that the situation is tragic for both for herself and her child.

̽��ֱ��focus of Mansfield’s story is not Bertha’s marriage but her relationship with her daughter. “Many of her [Mansfield’s] stories of modern life are miniature tragedies, rooted, in many cases, in the unwitting neglect of children,” Tate writes. For Truby King, children had no point of view: a regulated regime was best for them, regardless of how much they screamed with hunger. King’s inflexible routine for baby-rearing imposed military discipline on the messy chaos that is small babies.

King did face criticism from contemporaries – among those who argued against him was Dr GD Laing who experienced the pitiful cries of little ones being ignored until the allotted hour for feeding. Research by psychoanalysts John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion later showed that King’s system, though it succeeded with some babies, was disastrous for many. ̽��ֱ��infants who, desperately hungry or hurting, screamed themselves into silence may well have been traumatised – and early trauma has been linked to depression.

Those who suffer terribly in war seldom speak of their experiences as there are no words to describe it. They pass on their distress in other ways. In her memoir Alfred and Emily (2008), the novelist Doris Lessing (born in 1919) revisited her childhood. Her father lost a leg fighting in the First World War; her mother was a nurse looking after the war-wounded. “Do children feel their parents’ emotions,” Lessing wonders. “Yes, they do… ̽��ֱ��Great War… squatted over my childhood. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.”

̽��ֱ��Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice is published by Manchester ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset images: newspaper advert for Nestle; images from Mothercraft by Truby King's daughter, Mary; newspaper advert for Cow & Gate.

A collection of essays edited by Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy looks at the legacy of the First World War through the lens of the creative arts. As a specialist in the literature of conflict, Tate explores the ways in which writers expressed the impact of trauma on families – and child rearing in particular.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised

Figure from Mothercare, published by Truby King's daughter, Mary

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World War One: a Russian perspective

mjg209 — Wed, 13 May 2015 14:00:57 +0000

̽��ֱ��decision to go to war in 1914 had catastrophic consequences for Russia. ̽��ֱ��result was revolution, civil war and famine in 1917–20, followed by decades of Communist rule. A new book, Towards the Flame. Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, by research fellow Dominic Lieven explains why Russia's rulers allowed their country to be pulled into the First World War. It is a study of diplomacy and military policy, as well as of geopolitics and power. Lieven digs beneath the surface to investigate issues such as the structure of Russian government decision-making and the mentalities and values of the decision-makers: these are vital to any understanding of the forces that impelled Russia to war.

̽��ֱ��book also studies how Russia's rulers envisaged and planned for a future European conflict and does so on the basis of a mass of new and very revealing archival material. One of the book's strengths is that it is based on a vast trawl of materials from seven Russian archives, the most important of which were closed to foreign historians until the 1990s. In addition, Professor Lieven has found important new material in Russian émigré archives, and has utilised archival and published primary sources for all the other great powers.

̽��ֱ��Russo-Serbian relationship, vital to the outbreak of war in 1914, is just one area in which the mass of new archival materials Professor Lieven draws from Russian, American and private family archival holdings radically changes the received understanding of events. In this area he has read all the official correspondence between Russia's diplomatic and military representatives in Belgrade and the foreign and war ministers, as well as the unpublished memoirs and private correspondence both of the Russian number two in Belgrade and of the head of the Near Eastern (ie Balkan) department of the Foreign Ministry.

Professor Lieven says Towards the Flame provides a unique insight into the war and revolution that engulfed Russia in 1914-21, but it is about far more than just Russia. One third of the book provided international comparisons and contexts. By looking at the international crisis of the early twentieth century from an unusual Russian and east European angle one gains a radically different understanding of the war's causes, course and consequences.

For Professor Lieven the war was above all an east European war brought on by the struggle between empires and nationalisms. Though war was by no means inevitable in 1914 he says it was certainly no unforeseeable accident and, even if avoided in 1914, might well have happened in the near future. ̽��ֱ��basic issue at the root of the war - the struggle between empires and nationalisms - lay at the heart of twentieth-century world history , says Professor Lieven. At the very moment when this struggle drove Europe to war in 1914 it was - in the form of the Irish crisis - paralysing British government and threatening the United Kingdom with civil war. Professor Lieven argues that the Suez Crisis of 1956 was in many ways the "1914 moment" of the British and French empires: imperial elites, facing geopolitical decline and nationalist challenges, struck out with a combination of desperation, arrogance and miscalculation rather similar to Austrian behaviour in 1914.

This is one of the ways in which Professor Lieven draws parallels between the international crisis that led to the First World War and subsequent political developments, some of which are still highly relevant today. For example, he shows that the Ukrainian issue was far more important a source of Austro-Russian tension and Russian domestic weakness than Western historians of the First World War era allow. In those days, without Ukraine's agriculture, coal and metallurgical industry Russia would cease to be a great power.

In 1918 as a result of the Russian Revolution Ukraine became a nominally independent country and in fact a German protectorate. Had Germany been able to sustain the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk which established German domination of eastern and central Europe then it only needed a stalemate on the western front to ensure its victory in the First World War, says Professor Lieven. He argues that had the Germans not brought the United States into the war on the very eve of the Russian Revolution's destruction of Russian power then victory would have lain within their grasp. "Maybe such a victory and a Pax Germanica would have been better than the Versailles order which followed German defeat. ̽��ֱ��Versailles settlement was based on the defeat and exclusion of both Germany and Russia, which potentially were the continent's two most powerful countries. For that reason alone it was unlikely to survive," he says.

"For the Russian people the greatest tragedy of all was that the two million soldiers who died in Russia's First World War died for nothing. In large part because the Revolution meant that Russia was not one of the victors at Versailles, the first world war needed to be fought a second time at terrible cost 20 years later."

*Towards the Flame is published by Allen Lane on 28th May, price £25.00. Professor Lieven will be speaking about his book as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival at 7pm on May 30th.

Professor Dominic Lieven's new book provides a unique view of World War One gleaned from Russian archive material.

For the Russian people the greatest tragedy was that the two million soldiers who died in Russia's First World War died for nothing. In large part because the Revolution meant that Russia was not one of the victors at Versailles, the first world war needed to be fought a second time at terrible cost 20 years later.

Professor Dominic Lieven

Корсаков and Wikimedia Commons

Russian troops entering Lviv

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“When you are in it, war is hateful and utterly horrible.” A major Rupert Brooke collection comes to Cambridge

amb206 — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 08:00:01 +0000

̽��ֱ��First World War poet Rupert Brooke died 100 years ago (23 April 1915) on his way to fight at Gallipoli. An extensive collection of Brooke’s papers is held by King’s College where Brooke was an undergraduate and later a Fellow. It was his time at Cambridge that inspired some of Brooke’s most famous poems.

An award of £430,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) will now enable King’s College to acquire the last great collection of Rupert Brooke manuscripts still in private hands, the John Schroder Collection.

̽��ֱ��Schroder Collection contains writings by Brooke, hundreds of letters between Brooke and others, the records of his extraordinary publication history, as well as reports from eyewitnesses of his death and his burial on the Greek island of Skyros. John Schroder was a passionate collector of Brooke materials.

̽��ֱ��acquisition will complement King’s existing collection of Brooke papers and provide a rich source of previously unseen material for writers and researchers. It will also be of great interest to the public and exhibitions based on the collection are planned.

“Thanks to this generous award of £430,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund towards the £500,000 price of the manuscripts, we will be able to maintain the integrity of the Schroder Collection and allow future researchers to gain a better understanding of the man and his times. ̽��ֱ��centenary of Brooke’s death on the 23 April 2015 makes this announcement particularly auspicious,” said Peter Jones, King’s College Fellow Librarian.

“It is hard to realise today just how significant Brooke’s impact was 100 years ago. In the early 20th century as a poet you were fortunate to sell 200-300 copies of your work. Just after his death, Brooke’s close friend and patron Eddie Marsh published 1914 and Other Poems. ̽��ֱ��first edition of 1,000 sold out immediately and, in all, 160,000 copies were sold of various impressions. It was a huge literary event, fuelled by the timing and circumstances of Brooke’s death.”

A cult was created by Winston Churchill and other admirers who turned Brooke into a mythical figure of youthful hero-soldier-poet. In 1918 Eddie Marsh published a memoir about Brooke with his Collected Poems and this also sold more than 100,000 copies.

Jones said: “Some of Rupert Brooke’s family and closest friends, the ones who knew him the best, resented the fact that he was turned into this kind of national icon. They thought the picture of Brooke that emerged from this heroic story was not true to the man.”

In one of the letters that form part of the Schroder Collection, written on 8 August 1915, Brooke’s mother states firmly that it is her “final wish” for Marsh not to publish the memoir and adds that “I don’t think that you knew more than a small part of Rupert”. She later relented and allowed the memoir to be published.

Jones continued: “A much more complicated and rounded picture emerges when you can look at the manuscripts already at King’s alongside the Schroder Collection. Brought together, the two collections will tell a rather different story than we have so far. We now know much more about Brooke as a person and he is certainly more interesting and, in some ways more difficult, than the heroic image portrayed at the time of his death. He was a conflicted individual. He had a major breakdown in 1912 and had disastrous relationships with the women who loved him.”

̽��ֱ��Schroder Collection contains 170 documents by Brooke himself and many hundreds of letters from connected parties.

John Schroder’s passion for collecting began as a schoolboy when he bought a copy of Rupert Brooke’s Collected Poems and by the 1950s he was a deeply committed collector of all things Brooke. His most significant purchase was that of the Marsh/Brooke papers. He also met and spoke with the people who had been significant in Brooke’s life and acquired their correspondence.

̽��ֱ��papers express the feelings of those on the edge of the abyss. Cathleen Nesbitt, an actress and romantic interest of Brooke’s wrote cathartic letters to Marsh with poignant memories of their time together. In one letter she wrote that “when I talked of all things coming to an end he would always laugh and say ‘Hush – there’s never any end when things are perfect’”.

̽��ֱ��intensity of emotion generated by war is exemplified by letters from Brooke’s close friend, W Denis Browne, the composer and King’s scholar, who travelled with him to the Mediterranean and died at Gallipoli just a few weeks after the poet. Browne’s letter describes Brooke’s burial in Skyros, “one of the loveliest places on this earth, with grey-green olives round him, one weeping above his head: the ground covered with flowering sage, bluish grey & smelling more delicious than any other flower I know”.

Browne’s account of waiting for the bombardment of the Dardanelles straits to finish, so that the British forces could land, was sent to Eddie Marsh in 1915. Browne wrote: “This battle is the most wonderful thing there ever was. As heroic by land as it is wonderful by sea … there’s much of this that I’m glad Rupert did not see: and yet if only he cd have seen it all. It is wonderful when you are away: when you are in it war is hateful and utterly horrible.”

̽��ֱ��inclusion of a wide range and sources and perspectives – and also originals of texts that were later edited for public consumption – makes the Schroder Collection a valuable resource for researchers.

Time has not reduced the interest in Rupert Brooke. Together the King’s College and Schroder Collections will represent the world’s most significant archive of Rupert Brooke material, accessible for the first time, not just to scholars but to the interested public. A special section on the King’s College website and an exhibition in the Chapel are planned for later this year.

King’s College is now actively seeking the remaining funds needed to complete the purchase. https://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/members-and-friends/support/giving/enhancing-our-environment/library-and-archives

On the centenary of the death of Rupert Brooke, King’s College announces the acquisition of a major collection of materials relating to one of the nation’s best-loved poets. ̽��ֱ��collection will join the existing Rupert Brooke archive at King’s to make the world’s leading resource.

He is certainly more interesting and, in some ways more difficult, than the heroic image portrayed at the time of his death

Peter Jones

Photo by Maggs Bros

Rupert Brooke and Rugby Cadet Corps c.1906

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Gaudier-Brzeska show marks centenary of his death

sjr81 — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 11:48:43 +0000

Gaudier-Brzeska moved permanently to London in January 1911. He made a significant contribution to the development of modern sculpture as one of the key members of the Vorticist movement and by influencing a later generation of sculptors.

His precocious artistic talent was cut short by his death at the age of 23 while fighting for the French army in Neuville St Vaast, France, in 1915. As Ezra Pound wrote in 1916: ‘A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist is gone’.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, NEW RHYTHMS Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Art Dance and Movement in London 1911-1915, is the first to explore the artist’s engagement with dance and movement. New Rhythms brings together sculpture, drawing, photography, film, and archive material, combining the strengths of Kettle’s Yard’s sculpture and drawing collections with important loans from national and international institutions.

̽��ֱ��exhibition includes work by Gaudier-Brzeska’s contemporaries David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Percy Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Auguste Rodin, Helen Saunders and others who engaged with the subject of dance.

Kettle’s Yard holds one of the largest collections of sculptures and drawings by Gaudier-Brzeska, acquired by the creator of Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede in 1929. Ede went on to write the first seminal biography of Gaudier- Brzeska ‘Savage Messiah’ in 1930, using the letters that were exchanged between Gaudier-Brzeska and his partner Sophie Brzeska.

New Rhythms takes as its starting point Gaudier‐ Brzeska’s two contrasting sculptures Red Stone Dancer and Dancer. ̽��ֱ��exhibition looks in detail at the inspirations for the two sculptures of 1913, using them as studies for a wider exploration of the artist’s interests in the subject and the cultural milieu in which he was working.

For example, his engagement with the dynamic performances of the Ballets Russes is brought to the fore through his bronze Firebird (1912). As well as exploring dance, New Rhythms will investigate the artist’s wider fascination with motion, the physical dynamism of bodily movement, and wrestling.

̽��ֱ��new dance trends that exploded onto pre‐war London stages and screens such as Apache dance from Paris and Tango, and performances by the Ballets Russes, will be represented through photographs, printed sources and film.

̽��ֱ��show culminates by asking how Gaudier‐Brzeska’s dancers can inspire new rhythms now, through a contemporary dance and music commission. ̽��ֱ��work by Malgorzata Dzierzon, performed to new music commissioned from emerging composer Kate Whitley, will feature in the exhibition through film.

This will be the final exhibition at Kettle’s Yard before closing for a major development of the site and offers a chance for visitors to enjoy the house and an exhibition intimately linked to it and the permanent collection. It closes on June 21, 2015.

For more about the development plans and off site activity visit www.kettlesyard.co.uk.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will tour with selected works to Harewood House, Leeds, from 11 July to 1 November 2015 and is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

From March 17, Kettle’s Yard will present a major exhibition to mark the centenary of the death in the First World War of the French-born sculptor and draughtsman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915).

A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist is gone.

Ezra Pound

Kettle's Yard

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Black & White poster (aka Boxers), 1911

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Rivers beyond Regeneration

tdk25 — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 09:00:09 +0000

Thanks in no small part to the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker, which dramatized his work, William Halse Rivers is best known to history as the man who pioneered humane treatments for shell-shocked British officers during World War I, striking up a lifelong friendship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Six years earlier, however, the Cambridge polymath had rewritten the script of an entirely different discipline. Working in the Solomon Islands alongside a fellow-researcher, Arthur Hocart, Rivers transformed the study of human society, helping to establish the modern field of social anthropology.

Yet despite its foundational importance, the work has remained little-studied or known – partly because subsequent academics wrote it out of history in the course of laying claim to similar ideas. Now, a new book about the 1908 Solomon Islands expedition is attempting to correct that, revisiting the anthropological work of Rivers in Island Melanesia, and examining the impact of these half-forgotten contributions by a man better remembered for his compassionate treatment of soldiers who had been traumatised on the Western Front.

It also reveals the fascinating possibility that, as he revisited this earlier research after the war, Rivers’ upsetting experiences working with soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder bled into his work in the Solomons. At the time of his death, in 1922, he may have believed that society itself could be affected by a type of “shell-shock”, and that this had devastated indigenous populations in the Pacific.

̽��ֱ��book, ̽��ֱ��Ethnographic Experiment: AM Hocart and WHR Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908, features contributions from current researchers who, following Rivers’ and Hocart’s lead, have since carried out their own fieldwork in Melanesia. It will be launched on November 4 at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, where Rivers himself was a Fellow.

Tim Bayliss-Smith, Professor of Pacific Geography, and a contributor to the book said: “One of the reasons that Rivers was unusual was that he did so many things. He was a medic, psychologist, anthropologist, and famously served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. People have tended to look at those three careers from separate points of view, but it may not actually be possible to separate them completely.”

“Modern anthropology is often seen as having begun in the 1920s, when researchers pioneered an approach to studying societies that involved immersing themselves in the culture they were looking at, learning the language, participating and observing. But a lot of that was attempted, and to some extent achieved, by Rivers and Hocart in 1908, working with Solomon Islanders. What they recorded and did provided inspiration for a lot of anthropologists who have come since.”

Born in 1864, William Rivers originally trained in medical science, but gradually he became interested in the emerging fields of neurology and psychology – especially sensory phenomena and mental states.

At the same time, he also began to take an interest in the study of human society and culture. It was this that took him to the Torres Straits islands in 1898 and then to Melanesia in 1908, where he and Hocart sought to examine what now seems an archaic idea – that human societies had “evolved” through several stages of development and that the indigenous peoples of the British-controlled Solomon Islands, supposedly at an earlier stage, would display examples of the transition from a matrilineal to a patrilineal social organisation.

Although the expedition sprang from what is now an outdated hypothesis, the method the two used was, in the eyes of the new book’s authors, modern “anthropology in the making”.

Working on the small island of Simbo, the researchers pioneered what is now known as “participant observation”, living among the local people, and immersing themselves in their culture and everyday lives. Within the emerging social sciences this had not been done before, and it marked a turning point in the way in which Western thinkers attempted to understand societies their predecessors had considered exotic, remote, primitive and savage.

Because it was smaller and less well-documented than later, similar research, the six-month experiment was largely forgotten. Rivers and Hocart parted ways immediately after, and World War I found Rivers undertaking what became far more famous work at the military psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh, where he treated British officers who were suffering from shell-shock.

Deviating from standard approaches such as electric shock treatment, Rivers instead pioneered what a “talking cure”, which relied on encouraging patients to discuss their experiences and emotions. His work with Sassoon later provided much of the inspiration for Pat Barker’s 1991 novel, Regeneration.

̽��ֱ��new study suggests that some of this work may have stemmed from Rivers’ experiences in the Solomons, where he witnessed indigenous “healers” curing traumatised people through discussion and suggestion in a similar way.

Perhaps more strikingly, however, Bayliss-Smith suggests that Rivers’ wartime psychiatric contribution may have subsequently blended with his thoughts about Melanesia. Returning to Cambridge after the war, he appears to have begun to form the view that societies could suffer the same sort of post-traumatic stress as he had witnessed in soldiers. When he suddenly died in 1922, Rivers may have been close to diagnosing this societal “shell-shock” in Melanesia.

̽��ֱ��basis for this appears to have been genealogical information, which Rivers had compiled in 1908, and which showed that the indigenous population of the Solomon Islands had declined because of low fertility rates after the coming of British colonial power. After the war, he seems to have begun to theorise that the British Empire’s arrival delivered a destabilising psychological blow to Melanesian society that equated, on a much larger scale, to that experienced by individual soldiers in the trenches, and left it unable to function normally.

In particular, he argued that it had left women reluctant to conceive, eager to secure abortions and neglectful of their children. “ ̽��ֱ��people say to themselves, ‘Why should we bring children into the world only to work for the white man?’” Rivers wrote. “Measures which, before the coming of the European, were used chiefly to prevent illegitimacy have become the instrument of racial suicide.”

Bayliss-Smith suggests that Rivers’ emerging ideas about colonialism as shell-shock were a work in progress, interrupted by his sudden death in 1922. “Rivers seems to have believed that the psychic equilibrium of Melanesians had become unbalanced,” he said. “In their own way, Simbo Islanders were victims of a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and their case was somewhat parallel to the British soldiers and airmen who survived the mass slaughter of the First World War, only to become victims of shell-shock.”

“Historical demographers today place far more emphasis on the insidious impacts of introduced disease in the Pacific islands. It is ironic that Rivers, the medical doctor, almost completely overlooked disease, a reflection perhaps of his new mindset following the traumas of World War I.”

̽��ֱ��Ethnographic Experiment: AM Hocart and WHR Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908 is published by Berghahn Books. ̽��ֱ��book will be launched at an event at St John’s College, Cambridge, on November 4.

Best-known for his treatment of shell-shock victims in World War I, a new study examines William Rivers’ crucial, but often overlooked contributions to the study of human culture – revealing how, late in his career, they led him to believe that society as a whole could suffer from “shell-shock”.

Rivers seems to have believed that the psychic equilibrium of Melanesians had become unbalanced. In their own way, they were victims of a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, somewhat parallel to the British soldiers who became victims of shell-shock.

Tim Bayliss-Smith

St John's College, Cambridge

Detail from a portrait of William Halse Rivers in his Royal Army Medical Corps uniform.

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