Vera
Brittain, the only daughter of Thomas Brittain, a wealthy paper manufacturer,
and Edith Bervon, was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1893. Vera was
educated at home by a governess and then at a boarding school in Surrey,
where one of the teachers introduced her to the ideas of Dorothea
Beale and Emily Davies. Brittain was
also deeply influence by reading Women and
Labour by Olive
Schreiner.
Vera wanted to go to university but her father believed that the main
role of education was to prepare women for marriage. Eventually Thomas
Brittain relented and Vera was allowed to go to Somerville
College, Oxford.
In 1914 Vera met and fell in love with Roland Leighton, a friend of
her only brother, Edward. On the outbreak of the First
World War Roland and Edward Brittain joined the British
Army. Vera also wanted to become involved in the war effort and
decided to leave Somerville College and
become a nurse. She joined the Voluntary Aid
Detachment and served in England and in France.
Vera became engaged to Ronald Leighton, in August, 1915 but four months
later he was killed on the Western Front.
So also was her brother, Edward Brittain, and several of her close
friends.
After the Armistice Vera returned to
Somerville College where she met Winifred
Holtby. The two women graduated together in 1921 and they moved
to London where they hoped to establish themselves as writers. Vera's
first two novels, The Dark Tide
(1923) and Not Without Honour
(1925) sold badly and were ignored by the critics. Vera had more success
with her journalism and in 1920s wrote for the feminist journal, Time
and Tide. Vera also published two books on the role of women,
Women's Work in Modern Britain
(1928) and Halcyon or the Future of Monogamy
(1929).
In the 1920s Vera's political views became more radical and she left
the Liberals and joined the Labour
Party. For a time she considered becoming a MP but after marrying
the American academic, George Catlin, she went to live in the United
States. Vera found it difficult to settle in America and after
the birth of her two children, John (1927) and Shirley (1930) she
moved back to England where she lived with Winifred
Holtby.
In her first volume of autobiography, Testament
of Youth (1933) Brittain wrote about her struggle for education
and her experiences as a nurse during the First
World War. It was an immediate bestseller in Britain and the United
States. Her companion, Winifred Holtby died
in 1935 and Vera subsequently wrote about their relationship in her
book Testament of Friendship.
In the 1930s Brittain became a pacifist
and in 1934 supported Richard Sheppard
and his Peace Pledge Union and was
one of its leaders during the Second World War.
From September 1939 she began publishing Letters
to Peace Lovers, a small journal that expressed her views
on the war. This made her extremely unpopular as the journal criticised
the government for bombing urban areas
in Nazi Germany.
In
1943 Brittain attempted to explain her pacifism in her book Humiliation
with Honour. This was followed by Seeds
of Chaos, an attack on the government's policy of area
bombing.
After the war Vera wrote a history of the women's movement, Lady
into Women (1953). Other books included a second volume
of autobiography, Testament of Experience
(1957), Women at Oxford (1960)
and a biography of Frederick Pethick-Lawrence.
A strong opponent of nuclear weapons, in 1957 Brittain joined with
Kingsley Martin, J.
B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Fenner
Brockway, Victor Gollancz, Richard
Acland, A. J. P. Taylor, Canon
John Collins and Michael Foot to form
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Vera Brittain remained active in the peace movement until her death
in 1970.
Joyce
Dennys, VAD poster (1915)
(1)
In 1906 Vera Brittain was sent to Kingswood
School.
At the age of thirteen I was sent away to school at the
recently founded St Monica's at Kingswood in Surrey. Miss Heath Jones
was an ardent though always discreet feminist. She often spoke to
me of Dorothea Beale and Emily Davies, lent me books on the woman's
movement, and even took me with one or two of the other senior girls
in 1911 to what must have been a very mild and constitutional suffrage
meeting at Tadworth village.
Her encouragement even prevailed upon us to read the newspaper, which
were then quite unusual adjuncts to teaching in girls' private schools.
We were never, of course, allowed to have the papers themselves -
our innocent eyes might have strayed from foreign affairs to the evidence
being taken by the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce or the
Report of the International Paris Conference for the Suppression of
the White Slave Traffic.
(2)
After the war Vera Brittain recorded how difficult it was to get information
about the offensive at Neuve Chapelle.
As usual the Press had given no hint of that tragedy's dimensions,
and it was only through the long casualty lists, and the persistent
demoralizing rumours that owing to a miscalculation in time thousands
of our men had been shot down by our guns, that the world was gradually
coming to realise something of what the engagement had been.
(3)
Vera Brittain's boyfriend Roland Leighton, was killed on 23rd December
1916. Soon afterwards she visited his family home in Hassocks in Sussex.
I arrived at the cottage that morning to find his
mother and sister standing in helpless distress in the midst of his
returned kit, which was lying, just opened, all over the floor. The
garments sent back included the outfit that he had been wearing when
he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary
to return such relics - the tunic torn back and front by the bullet,
a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained
breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry.
Those gruesome rages made me realise, as I had never realised before,
all that France really meant. Eighteen months afterwards the smell
of Etaples village, though fainter and more diffused, brought back
to me the memory of those poor remnants of patriotism.
(4)
Vera Brittain describing a field camp hospital in Etaples in 1918
in her book A Testament of Youth.
I am a Sister VAD, and orderly all in one. Quite apart from the
nursing, I have stoked the fire all night, done two or three rounds
of bed pans, and kept the kettles going and prepared feeds on exceedingly
black Beatrice oil stoves and refilled them from the steam kettles
utterly wallowing in paraffin all the time. I feel as if I had been
dragged through the gutter. Possibly acute surgical is the heaviest
type of work there is, I think, more wearing than anything else on
earth. You are kept on the go the whole time but in the end there
seems to be nothing definite to show for it - except that one or two
are still alive that might otherwise have been dead.
The picture
came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle
of hell during the 'emergency' of March 22nd 1918, gazing half hypnotized
at the disheveled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered
boots and piles of muddy clothing, the brown blankets turned back
from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy bloodstained bandages.
Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror
waited for me and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in
this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted
meat glass half full of methylated spirit.
The cold
is terrific; the windows of the ward are all covered with icicles.
I'm going about in a jersey and long coat. By the middle of December
out kettles, hot water bottles and sponges were all frozen hard when
we came off duty if we had not carefully emptied and squeezed them
the night before. Getting up to go on duty in the icy darkness was
a shuddering misery almost as exacting as an illness.
Our vests, if we hung them over a chair, went stiff and we could keep
them soft only if we slept in them. All the taps froze; water for
the patients had to be cut down to a minimum and any spilt in the
passages turned in a few seconds to ice.
Sometimes in the middle of the night we have to turn people out of
bed and make them sleep on the floor to make room for the more seriously
ill ones who have come down from the line. We have heaps of gassed
cases at present : there are 10 in this ward alone. I wish those people
who write so glibly about this being a holy war, and the orators who
talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts and what
it may mean, could see a case - to say nothing of 10 cases of mustard
gas in its early stages - could see the poor things all burnt and
blistered all over with great suppurating blisters, with blind eyes
- sometimes temporally, some times permanently - all sticky and stuck
together, and always fighting for breath, their voices a whisper,
saying their throats are closing and they know they are going to choke.
The strain
is very, very great. The enemy is within shelling distance - refugee
sisters crowding in with nerves all awry - bright moonlight, and aeroplanes
carrying machine guns - ambulance trains jolting into the siding,
all day, all night - gassed men on stretchers clawing the air - dying
men reeking with mud and foul green stained bandages, shrieking and
writhing in a grotesque travesty of manhood - dead men with fixed
empty eyes and shiny yellow faces.
(5)
Letter from Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain (August, 1915)
Among this chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless
earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured
out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible
than Honour or their Country's Glory or another's Lust of Power. Let
him who thinks that war is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll
forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and
Valour and Love of Country. Let him look at a little pile of sodden
grey rags that cover half a skull and a shine bone and what might
have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting
half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that
it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around
it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have
distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous
putrescence.
(6)
Vera Brittain, Testament of Experience (1979)
Ever since Armistice Day 1918 had found me alone, with my young
and dear contemporaries gone, I had been trying to understand why
they died. Was not the unthinking acceptance of an aggressive or short-sighted
national policy, followed by mass-participation in sociable war-time
activities, one of the ingredients which created a militant psychology
and made shooting wars possible? I had studied their consequences
too, and knew how rapid a deterioration of civilised values followed
the initial nobility and generosity, until the Christian virtues themselves
came to be regarded with derision.
Surely
the path which I had trodden for two decades now summoned me to struggle
against that catastrophic process? Though I still underrated the cost
of such a stand, I knew that the routine performance of dangerous
duties would be stimulating and congenial compared with the exhausting
demands of independent thought and the task of maintaining, against
the deceptive surge of popular currents, a conscious realisation of
what was actually happening.
And where,
apart from the usual writings and speeches, could I newly begin? An
idea suddenly came from my endeavours to answer the daily quota of
letters from unknown correspondents which had increased so rapidly
since the outbreak of war. Some wanted to help others to be helped;
all were eager to stop hostilities. One correspondent hopefully suggested
that the women of the world should immediately unite, and call a truce.
By means
of a regular published letter I could not only reply to these anxious,
bewildered people, but seek out and rally such independent-minded
commentators as the author who wrote to deplore the lack of vision
among Britain's rulers.
A periodic
word to similar correspondents, if based on determined research behind
the news, could elucidate vital issues for the doubting, galvanise
the discouraged, and assure the isolated that ' they were not alone.
Its title, I thought, might be Letter to Peace Lovers, for
the group that I hoped to reach was much wider than the small bodies
of organised war-resisters.
(7)
Circular sent out to people considering subscribing to Letters
to Peace Lovers (1939)
What I do want is to consider and discuss with you the ideas,
principles and problems which have concerned genuine peace-lovers
for the past twenty years. In helping to sustain the spirits of my
readers (and through writing to them to invigorate my own). I hope
to play a small part in keeping the peace movement together during
the dark hours before us. By constantly calling on reason to mitigate
passion, and truth to put falsehood to shame, I shall try, so far
as one person can, to stem the tide of hatred which in wartime rises
so quickly that many of us are engulfed before we realise it.
In a word,
I want to help in the important task of keeping alive decent values
at a time when these are undergoing the maximum strain.
My only
object is to keep in close personal touch with all who are deeply
concerned that war shall end and peace return and who understand what
Johan Bojer meant when he wrote: "I went and sowed corn in mine
enemy's field that God might exist".
(8)
Vera Brittain, Letters to Peace Lovers (25th October, 1939)
Even supposing that we do destroy Hitler, we shall not again be
confronted by a Europe agreeably free from competitors for power.
The disappearance of Herr Hitler will probably lead instead to a revolutionary
situation in Germany, controlled by puppets who own allegiance to
another Power. We, the democracies, will still be faced by totalitarianism,
in a form less clumsy but no less aggressive, and even more sinister
in its ruthless unexhausted might.
(9)
Francis
Partridge,
diary entry (25th January, 1940)
Spent most of the morning reading Vera Brittain on Winifred Holtby
- frightfully bad, but it aroused various reflections. It is a glorification
of the second-rate and sentimental and reeks of femininity. Why should
woman on woman so painfully lack irony, humour or bite? And it's too
winsome and noble, somehow. But much of that belongs to the First
War, and not to women only. (There it is in Rupert Brooke.) A musty
aroma of danger glamourized and not understood by girls at home floats
out of this book. Vera Brittain writes of the number of women now
happily married and with children who still hark back to a khaki ghost
which stands for the most acute and upsetting feelings they have ever
had in their lives. Which is true I think, and the worst of it is
that the ghost is often almost entirely a creature of their imagination.
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