Author Vera Brittain ‘should be remembered as a flag bearer for equality’

STAFFORDSHIRE HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS LOOKS AT THE LIFE OF TESTAMENT OF YOUTH WRITER VERA BRITTAIN

WITH International Women’s Day having taken place earlier this month, it’s apt to remember one of the most influential women to emerge from my home town of Newcastleunder-lyme.

Vera Brittain (1893-1970) wrote 29 books that embraced biography, novels and poetry, but it was her powerful autobiography, Testament of Youth (1933) that made her name.

Another Staffordian – and GMB trade union official – Margaret Clarke, above, attempts to describe in a nutshell the bustling life of one of her heroines:

“She was a true feminist, dedicated to improving women’s lives. She was committed in all her endeavours and saw terrible atrocities in the First World War when she served as a nurse in France.

“Women had a pivotal role to play during the Great War, and she was heavily involved in that. No wonder that she grew to be a pacifist and wrote extensively on the subject.”

Margaret, who was born at the Higherland, in Newcastle, 68 years ago – and whose mother was coincidentally named Vera – was the daughter of a Newcastle burgess, Jesse Clarke, and this indirectly fired her interest in feminism.

She explains: “When my brothers reached the age of 21, they became burgesses too, but I couldn’t on account of my gender – and I resented that.

“So I’ve fought for women’s rights and equality ever since, which is why I was delighted to hear Baroness Shirley Williams – Vera Brittain’s daughter – speak on the author and feminist’s life from the stage of the Hartshill Medical Institute a few years ago.” Margaret tells me that she left the event with an even greater insight into the life of Vera Brittain: “What touched me deeply was the personal tragedy she endured – losing her fiancé and brother and friends, all killed at war. This had a big effect on Vera’s life.

“In fact, it motivated her in becoming more active in her fight for peace and feminism.”

Vera was born in Sidmouth

Avenue, Newcastle, and I’ve spoken to local history groups outside the house, always semi-expecting the nervous owners’ curtains to rustle at any time.

In the first chapter of Testament of Youth, Vera writes about her family history, informing us that an ancestor, Richard Brittain, was the town mayor in 1741, whilst her great grandfather had worked in a private bank in Newcastle in the 1850s. In later times, the family came to run a paper mill in the town.

As a young woman, Vera faced challenges and heartache that would have broken many weaker individuals. The man she loved – Roland Leighton – was shot in the head in the trenches at the age of 19, during Christmas, 1915. She also lost her brother Edward and two close friends during the carnage.

She appears to have felt that she had a debt of honour to play an active part in the war effort, and so became a VAD (voluntary aid detachment) nurse, caring for mutilated and sometimes maddened soldiers in London, Malta and France.

She now led a bullet-dodging, heart-racing, head-cracking existence that was a far cry from the leafy tranquillity of the Brampton or her former genteel, middle-class life in oh-so conventional Buxton, where ‘getting on in life’ meant finding a husband and settling down to unchallenging domestic life.

Make no mistake, Testament of Youth is a weighty, harrowing read, graphically describing – as Margaret says - the demise of healthy young men dear to Vera, and her profound sense of loss.

Nevertheless, there is the odd snippet of family information that raises a smile. For example, we read that Vera’s father was not present at her birth. It was Christmas, and he was watching a pantomime in Hanley.

Incidentally, Mr Brittain was once told by a publisher’s traveller that the pottery towns held the lowest record for book-buying in England.

Vera left Newcastle about 18 months after she was born, moving to Macclesfield and later to Buxton – however, she occasionally returned to Newcastle on business or to collect material for her books. She was guest of honour at a prize distribution at Orme Girls’ School in 1935.

What did she think of her native town? As a young woman, she was of the opinion that such a typically provincial place could never produce a man or woman of the smallest eminence – though she was ultimately to meet one local man who made good, to wit, Sir Joseph Cook, the Silverdale pit boy who became Australian Prime Minister and High Commissioner.

There’s an element of middle-class snobbery that permeates Vera’s book that reminds me a little of Arnold Bennett at his most supercilious – and it’s an interesting comparison to make because both her father and Arnold Bennett went to school in Newcastle.

She wrote that her relatives, even after Arnold had published his masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale in

1908, ‘thought nothing much of the Bennetts, whom they characteristically described as ordinary people.’

Vera’s daughter Baroness Williams came to Brampton Park in 2000 in order to plant a beech tree in memory of her mother – and here’s an irony. Among the funders were the Arnold Bennett Society.

There’s another nod to Vera Brittain to be found in Brampton Park, near to the Borough Museum and Art Gallery, to wit, a sculpture marking the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.

It depicts a woman reading a letter sent from the Armed Forces, informing her that family members have died in battle. Below the figure is a paved slab offering a poignant extract from Testament of Youth.

Vera wrote in the book of her visit to the family dentist in Newcastle and her subsequent reflections on the War in a ‘tree-shadowed walk called the Brampton.’

She pondered, grimly, on the fate of ‘25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay, the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilisation.’

When peace was declared in November, 1918, Vera wrote that people in London didn’t cry in jubilation, ‘We’ve won the War!’

She wrote that they only said, ‘The War is over.’ It had been a brutal, blood-sucking four years.

What Vera does in her book is to completely debunk the notion that war had any romance or glamour about it, as may have been imagined by the so-called boys’ battalions and those with the Panglossian view that the war ‘would be over by Christmas.’

Her book was a warning for the next generation, and sadly, one that went unheeded.

In the past few years, I’ve been to Buxton with fellow members of Burslem History Club, and taken photographs of her old home – Melrose.

I find Vera an intriguing character, because she was a modern thinker.

Like Eleanor Marx and other progressives, she advocated a form of egalitarian marriage. She railed against the idea that married partners who had come to hate one another should be forced to live together in the name of morality.

And though she might be seen as a feminist who was very much in the vanguard of the march for female emancipation in the early 20th Century, her brand of feminism was very broad. It couldn’t be anything else, shaped as it was by the death of the men she loved. She wanted to show how the war and the post-war period had affected both sexes.

“Vera Brittain was a passionate, brutally honest and humane woman, fighting to be heard in what was still a man’s world,” concludes Margaret Clarke. “She should be remembered as a real flag bearer for equality.”