Vera Brittian - A testement of Youth
This year marks 110 years since the beginning of the First World War, a conflict which lasted from 1914 to 1918 and claimed the lives of between 15 to 22 million people.
We remember the war through Remembrance Day services, through researching our ancestors who lived through it as well as through popular media like films. I remember watching a film about a girl called Vera, who lived in a town called Buxton. Years later I read ‘Testament of Youth’, Vera Brittian’s autobiography which inspired the film. Although Brittain was rarely complimentary about Buxton, her book is nevertheless an important insight into the female wartime experience as well as how towns such as Buxton mobilised for war.
Brittain was not from Buxton originally. Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1893, her family moved to Macclesfield when she was 18 months year old, moving to Buxton when she was 10. Many of her recollections from this period are about being an avid reader, her wish to write and of her younger brother Edward who was 18 months her junior. Educated in Surrey, after finishing school in 1912 Brittian became, in her words, ‘a provincial debutante’.
‘‘But when I became, in 1912, a provincial debutante, decked out in London-bought garments that I did not know how to wear, the War was still two years away and my hospital service more than three. That unparalleled age of rich materialism and tranquil comfort, which we who grew up at its close will never see again, appeared to us to have gone on from time immemorial, and be securely destined to continue for ever.’
The war began on 28 July 1914, although Britian would not declare war on Germany until 4 August. With Edward and his friend Roland, who would later become Brittian’s fiancé, being raised with a pro patria mindset and, like many men their age, eager to fight in the war Brittain’s concern at the news of war was for her brother.
“Edward, whose risks, whatever happened, were likely to be greater than mine, took the whole situation more calmly, as he always took everything. On that evening of August 4th he had gone serenely to the local Hippodrome with a Buxton friend, Maurice Ellinger… Already the two boys were discussing, though quite vaguely, the possibilities of enlisting. When they returned from the Hippodrome they brought back a ‘Late Special’ which they told us that no answer had been received from Germany, and Edward related, which much amusement, how he had seen a German waiter thrown over the wall of the Palace Hotel.”
The news of war was terrifying, despite the common contemporary belief that the war would be over by Christmas.
“After that events moved, even in Buxton, very quickly. The German cousins of some acquaintances left town in a panic. My parents rushed over in the car to familiar shops in Macclesfield and Leek, where they laid in stores of cheese, bacon and butter under the generally shared impression that by next week we might all be besieged by Germans. While rumours circulated from mouth to mouth; they were more plentiful than the newspapers, over which a free fight broke out on the station platform every time a batch came by train from London or Manchester.”
“One or two Buxton girls were hurriedly married to officers summoned to unknown destinations. Pandemonium swept over the town. Holiday trippers wrestled with one another for the Daily Mail; habitually quiet and respectable citizens struggled like wolves over the provisions in food-shops and vented upon the distracted assistants their dismay that all the prices had suddenly gone up.”
“‘On the night that the British ultimatum to Germany expired, I went up to Higher Buxton for a meeting of the University Extension Committee, to which I had recently been elected; we only took a moment to decide to do nothing until the never very ardent local zest for learning re-emerged from its total eclipse by the European deluge, so I spent the rest of the evening in wandering round the town. I read, with a feeling that I had been transported back into an uglier century, the mobilisation order on the door of the Town Hall; I joined the excited little group around the Post Office to watch a number of local worthies who had suddenly donned their Territorial uniforms and were driving importantly about in motorcars with their wives or their chauffeurs at the wheel. Later, on my way home, I found the Pavilion Gardens deserted, and a depressed and very much diminished band playing lugubriously to rows of empty chairs.”
Buxton was billeted as a hospital town in the war. Its reputation for wellness that had been built up since the opening of the Crescent by the 5th Duke of Devonshire in 1789 meant that it was seen as a perfect place for soldiers to convalesce and recover from their injuries sustained at the Front. Treatments involved various water cures and many of the town’s hydropathic hotels were turned into hospitals. The Peak Hydropathic Hotel (which was home to Buxton Museum), the Empire Hotel and the Buxton Hydro (both now demolished) were turned into hospitals for Canadian soldiers.
“An hotel on the main street, Spring Gardens, was turned into a Red Cross Supply Depot, where ‘helpers’ went to listen to the gossip that would otherwise have been carried on more privately over tea-tables. They wasted so much material on amateur cutting-out of monstrous shirts and pyjamas, that in the end a humble local dressmaker whom my mother employed for our summer cottons had to be called in to do the real work, while the polite female society of Buxton stalked up and down the hotel rooms, rolled a few bandages, and talked about the inspiration of helping one’s country win the war.”
The popular image of the First World War is of these soldiers at the Front, of trenches and No Man’s Land. There is no real space for women in these popular narratives but that does not mean that they felt the war any less keenly at home, worried about their loved ones at war. Since finishing school in 1912, Brittain had been arguing with her father to allow her to go to Oxford to continue her studies. He allowed her but by this point it was 1915 and Brittain, like many of her contemporaries, were looking for a way to be involved and help with the war. Some volunteered locally with the Red Cross whilst others, like Brittain, were drawn to nursing. For Brittain, living in a hospital town, she had options.
‘There’s a feel of the past here. Buildings exude atmosphere. What brought people here in the past has not changed. Who lived here? Who brought it to life? The lifeblood of the people is in the walls.“On Sunday morning, June 27th, 1915, I began my nursing at the Devonshire Hospital…
From our house above the town I ran eagerly downhill to my first morning’s work, not knowing, fortunately for myself, that my servitude would last nearly four years. The hospital had originally been used as a riding-school, but a certain Duke of Devonshire, with exemplary concern for the sick but none whatever for the feet of the nursing staff, had caused it to be converted into its present charitable purpose. The main part of the building consisted of a huge dome, with two stone corridors running above the other round its quarter-mile circumference. The nurses were not allowed to cross its diameter, which contained an inner circle reserved for convalescent patients, so that everything forgotten or newly required meant a run around the circumference.
My hours there ran from 7.45 a.m. until 1 p.m., and then again from 5.0 p.m. until 9.15 p.m. – a longer day, as I afterwards discovered, than that normally required at many Army hospitals. No doubt the staff was not unwilling to make the utmost use of so enthusiastic and unsophisticated a probationer. Meals, for all of which I was expected to go home, were not included in these hours. As our house was nearly half a mile from the hospital on the slope of a steep hill, I never completely overcame the aching in my back and the soreness of my feet throughout the time that I worked there, and felt perpetually as if I had just returned from a series of long route marches.”
Brittian would work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse for the rest of the war serving in London, Malta and France. She lost her younger brother Edward, remembered on the war memorial on the Slopes, as well as her fiancé Roland and many friends. For the rest of her life, she worked as a writer and pacifist, her works (such as Testament of Youth) highlighting the futility and great lose of war. During the Second World War, Vera Brittain’s name was in Hitler’s Black Book due to her work towards pacifism.
Whilst Brittain’s works aren’t particularly complimentary of the town she grew up, we cannot omit her from our town’s wartime story. History is full of unintentional archivists and whilst written and published in 1933, Testament is written from Brittain’s wartime diaries, making her an unintentional archivist of Buxton First World War experience as well as the experience of many women and their wartime experiences and losses.
I am going to end this blog with the second half of the first quote about Brittain’s time as a provincial debutante. The book is full of many poignant passages and I recommend that you read it, especially at this time of year when we remember the war dead. It is available to buy in the Pump Room.
“Three years afterwards, as I was clearing out my desk before going as a V.A.D. to London – I was quitting Buxton for ever, though I did not then realise it – I came across a ribbon-tied heap of my early dance-programmes carefully put away in a drawer. By that time so many fatuous young men had acquired dignity through death in France and the Dardanelles, that these records of my dances with them seem like incongruous souvenirs of a long-vanished and half-forgotten world – a world in which only the sinking of the Titanic had suddenly but quote temporarily reminded its inhabitants of the vanity of human calculations.”
All quotes taken from Brittain, Vera. (1933) 2009. Testament of Youth. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
An exclusive talk by Kathryn Ecclestone and also the launch of a new biography about Vera Brittain takes place in the Pump Room on Saturday 14 December at 7.00pm
