The 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.
The 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.
The 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. The 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. The 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.”
The Schroder Collection contains 170 documents by Brooke himself and many hundreds of letters from connected parties.
The 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.
Writers such as Lorna Beckett, Chair of the Rupert Brooke Society who has used some of Brooke’s letters as the basis for a love story comments: “It is wonderful news that King's College are purchasing the highly important Schroder Collection, I can think of no better way of marking the centenary of Brooke's death. This will make new material available to the public which is exciting and very welcome. It helps us gain a greater knowledge and understanding of Rupert Brooke, who, in my opinion, continues to this day to be greatly misunderstood and misrepresented. He was an interesting, complex and likeable person who is still suffering from the hostile backlash brought about by the 'young Apollo' myth created straight after his death."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. http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/library/munby-fund/how-donate.html
Events
2015 marks 500 years since the King’s College Chapel stonework was completed, and the College is marking this milestone with a series of concerts, services and performances marking each of the centuries. 1915 is celebrated with ‘The Fateful Journey’ on 26th April, a sequence of words and music devised to commemorate the centenary of the death of Kings’ beloved alumnus Rupert Brooke en route to Gallipoli with friends and composers FS Kelly and Denis Browne. The dramatised recital written by Cambridge academic and biographer Kate Kennedy includes newly discovered unpublished songs; tickets are available from the King’s College Visitor Centre.
This special evening is part of a weekend festival to commemorate the life of Rupert Brooke www.rupertbrooke.com/events
Lorna Beckett has written a book The Second I Saw You (published by the British Library), about the love affair between Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner told through their letters and memoir. It is to be launched on Sunday at Brooke’s former home the Old Vicarage, Granchester.
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