Tag: Winston Churchill

Rupert Brooke

Written by Lawrance, W on 3rd August, 2012. Posted in Poet Biographies.

Rupert Chawner Brooke was born at Rugby on 3rd August 1887, the middle of the three sons of William and Mary Brooke. William Brooke was a Classics master at Rugby, where Rupert and this brothers Richard and William grew up under the watchful eye of their domineering mother.

Brooke was educated at Hillbrow Preparatory School, then at Rugby, where he showed himself to be gifted, both academically and on the sports field. This, coupled with his handsome features, made him a popular student. In 1906, Brooke won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and enjoyed an idyllic life of outings, picnics and boating on the Cam. At the same time, he embarked upon a series of unsuccessful love affairs and at the end of each, became almost suicidally depressed: a situation not helped by the death of his older brother Richard in 1907. During his final year at King’s Brook moved to the Old Vicarage at Grantchester in order to make a determined effort to put his problems behind him and focus on his studies.

In 1910, Brooke’s father died, so he stood in as temporary housemaster for one term, before beginning to work on a thesis on Webster and the Elizabethan dramatists, which would later earn him a fellowship at King’s. He also embarked on another doomed affair with Katharine Cox, the failure of which saw him leave England, bound for the Continent. In May 1912, while travelling, he wrote his most famous pre-war poem, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which evokes the archetypal image of Edwardian England.

Upon his return to England in late 1912, Brooke was introduced by Edward Marsh (a leading patron of the arts and private secretary to Winston Churchill) to many literary figures, including Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, with whom Brooke collaborated on the Georgian Anthology of poems.

In spring 1913, Brooke left England again, travelling to America and Canada, before proceeding to New Zealand and then Tahiti, where he fell in love with a beautiful Samoan girl named Taatamata. By the summer of 1914, Brooke was back in England and following the declaration of war, he gained a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division – with the assistance of Winston Churchil (then First Lord of the Admiralty). On October 4th, Brooke and his battalion, Anson, left for Antwerp to help stem the German advance through Belgium. This exercise proved a failure and the men joined the Belgian refugees fleeing the approaching German troops. By October 9th, Brooke was back in England and this would prove to be his only military experience of the war.

Brooke transferred to Hood battalion and at the end of November began working on the five sonnets that would make him famous. He completed them in early 1915 and send them to Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. On February 28th, Brooke boarded the Grantully Castle, bound for Gallipoli but, while en-route, at the beginning of April, he became unwell, developing a sore on his upper lip. Slowly his health seemed to improve and he received a letter from Edward Marsh telling him that his sonnet The Soldier had been read during a sermon at St Paul’s and subsequently published in The Times.

However, on April 20th, Brooke’s illness returned and by the following day he had deteriorated even further. After examination by several doctors it was agreed that the problem was an infected mosquito bite and despite all attempts to save him, Rupert Brooke died on the afternoon of 23rd April 1915. He was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, where his grave still lies.

The blow to Brooke’s mother was compounded by the death of her only remaining son, William just nine weeks later on the Western Front, where he was serving as a Second Lieutenant with the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles).

In the aftermath of Brooke’s death, his friends sought to bring his poetry to the attention of the general public and volumes of his work sold in large numbers. Brooke had made Wilfrid Wilson Gibson a legatee of his literary estate (along with Walter de la Mare and Lascelles Abercrombie), thus ensuring that Gibson’s previous financial difficulties were a thing of the past.

Although Brooke’s poetry has sometimes been criticised for its lack of realism and its sentimentality, it should be born in mind that many poets were writing in a similar style at the time. Whether Brooke would have changed his tone had he gone on to experience the realities of trench warfare later in the war, remains an unanswerable question. However, we must credit him for capturing the very essence of his time, encapsulating the pride and patriotism then being displayed by so many of his generation.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Written by Lawrance, W on 31st May, 2011. Posted in Historical Figures.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, his family’s ancestral home, on 30th November 1874. He was educated at St George’s School, Ascot, Brunswick School in Hove and then Harrow. He attended the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, following which he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. He also took the unusual step of becoming a war correspondent which meant he both fought in and wrote about conflicts in India and the Sudan before resigning his commission in 1899 to become a journalist and politician.

Churchill returned to England, following a daring escape during the Boer War, in 1900 and was elected to Parliament that same year. In September 1908, he married Clementine Hozier and they went on to have five children, although one of them, Marigold, died in infancy. By 1914, Churchill’s political career had advanced and he was First Lord of the Admiralty when war broke out. Following the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign, he was forced to resign and went into the army, where he rose to the rank of Colonel, in command of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. In 1917, he was recalled by David Lloyd George and made Secretary of State for Munitions.

After the war, in 1924, Churchill was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, although defeat in the 1929 election saw him out of office and he remained in the political wilderness for the next decade. When the Second World War began, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and then in May 1940 he became Prime Minister – an office which he held for the duration of the conflict. In July 1945, he was defeated at the General Election and became Leader of the Opposition until October 1951, when he was once again returned to office.

Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955 at the age of 80, although he remained on the back benches until 1964, when he stood down. He died in January 1965 at the age of 90. He was given a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, before being buried at St Martin’s Church, Bladen, not far from Blenheim Palace.

The Dardanelles

Written by web.admin on 17th May, 2011. Posted in Featured Posts, History.

While a great deal of the action during the First World War took place on the Western Front, there were many among the Allies who sought to divert attention to somewhere else and it was generally agreed that the best place for this was to launch an offensive in the Dardanelles, against the Turks. This plan was proposed to the war cabinet by First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill and consisted initially of a series of naval attacks, which began on February 19th. Over the coming weeks, the British and French naval vessels bombarded the Dardanelles, but many ships were lost, particularly from mines and the offensive was soon abandoned.

It was decided, therefore, that a full ground attack was required and, on April 25th, this began with landings at Helles and Gaba Tepe (which became known as Anzac Cove). Although two beachheads were established and further landings were made, the Turks were well dug-in and prepared for defence. By the middle of 1915, little progress had been made, but there were many casualties both from battle wounds and due to various digestive disorders.

The campaign continued through the summer, but by the autumn, there was stalemate and it was decided that Allied Troops should be withdrawn. This exercise, which was probably the most successful part of the whole campaign, began on 7th December.

The Dardanelles campaign, or Gallipoli – as it has now become known – saw the first major combat of the war for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), who suffered huge losses, but showed themselves to be both brave and honourable men. Due to the failure of this campaign, Winston Churchill resigned from the government and went to the Western Front, where he served for several months.

Gallipoli Literary Links

Several of the war poets served in the Dardanelles Campaign, including Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Nowell Oxland, Geoffrey Dearmer and Alan P. Herbert. Rupert Brooke also sailed for Gallipoli on 28th February 1915 aboard the Grantully Castle. By the beginning of April, while still on board, he had become sick, having developed a sore on his upper lip. Although his health seemed to rally, by 20th April he was again complaining of feeling unwell and was transferred to a hospital ship, where surgeons and medical officers diagnosed the cause of the problem as an infected mosquito bite. Rupert Brooke died on the afternoon of 23rd April 1915, appropriately St George’s Day. In a hastily organised funeral on the nearby island of Skyros, he was buried in an olive grove in a simple ceremony attended by his friends, including Arthur Asquith and Patrick Shaw-Stewart.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart himself, like Brooke, served with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, seeing action at Gallipoli, which he survived. A poet of great promise, he had attended Balliol College, Oxford with Julian Grenfell and showed every sign of a promising future, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Shaw-Stewart was killed in action on 30th December 1917, having refused to go back to his own lines, despite the fact that his ear had been torn off by shrapnel shortly beforehand.

Nowell Oxland had been a childhood friend of fellow war poet William Noel Hodgson and both men had volunteered to serve in the early days of the conflict. Oxland served with the 6th Border Regiment and wrote a poem entitled “Outward Bound” in which he expresses his prophetic regret that he will not return from overseas to see his beloved Cumberland again. This proved sadly true as Oxland was killed at Suvla Bay on 9th August 1915.

Geoffrey Dearmer became one of the longest surviving war poets, living until August 1996, by which time he was 103 years old. During the First World War, Dearmer served with the Royal Fusiliers and the Royal Army Service Corps, seeing action in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Both his mother and his younger brother, Christopher died during the conflict, the former while nursing and the latter at Gallipoli on 6th October 1915. The son of a clergyman, Dearmer went on to work for the BBC for twenty years and, despite his experiences in the First World War, retained his faith, never becoming embittered.

Alan P. Herbert saw action in Gallipoli serving like Brooke and Shaw-Stewart, in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He had volunteered on 5th September 1914, sailing for the Dardanelles the following May. By this time, his youngest brother, Owen had already been killed on 27th October 1914. Herbert was invalided home in August 1915, only to find that his father had died in his absence. He also saw action on the Western Front, where he was wounded, only returning to his unit just before the Armistice. After the war, he joined the staff of Punch Magazine and stood, successfully, as an MP in 1935. During the Second World War, Herbert served as a Petty Officer in the Royal Naval Auxiliary Patrol and his wife, Gwen (whom he had married in 1914, just before he went to war) was an ambulance driver. He died in 1971, appropriately on November 11th, still haunted by the friendships he had made and lost on the battlefields of the First World War.