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By Zoe, October 30, 2010 9:30 am

I noticed today that 30 October was the day of the year on which George, Siegfried Sassoon’s only child, was born in 1936. So, in the spirit commemoration, I have just been down to the stacks to take a look at items in the collection which originate from the period to see what light they throw on this period of Sassoon’s life.
There is quite a variety of material but what really caught my eye was a volume of preparatory notes (MS Add.9852/7/1/3) which were eventually worked up to become ‘The Old Century’. The quarto volume is cloth covered and Sassoon has decorated the front with one his characteristic harlequin patterns of coloured blocks and shapes. He has ruled a wide margin left side of each page filling the right with dense draft notes over which there are many scorings out and annotations. Conveniently for us, Sassoon has recorded the dates on which he compiled these notes. He begun on 16 March 1936. The timing is interesting; perhaps this sudden focus on childhood recollections was spurred by the realisation that Hester’s much longed for pregnancy had become established? Sassoon continued to make these notes up until 9 July and then did not resume them until 22 December 1936. The three month break in his prose work seems to correspond to a number of things: a transfer of attention to poetry writing including ‘A Message for our Time’; the removal of the couple from Heytesbury to London to put Hester under the care of the best metropolitan doctors; and a settling down period after the arrival of George.
I ran across another delightful letter of 25 June 1938 (MS Add.9852/12/1/3) from Sassoon to Hester who was away with George at Bodenham, Wiltshire. In the centre of a paragraph about replacing George’s nanny with a more suitable candidate (defined as being one without knowledge of the works of D.H. Lawrence) there is a tiny, curious ink sketch. It depicts a woman pushing a pram from which two arms, a leg and the face of a bad tempered infant project at all angles!

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By Zoe, October 29, 2010 11:20 am

Blog readers, especially those with older children looking for a half-term activity, may be interested to know of event taking place in the Library tomorrow:

Saturday 30 October 2010, 11.00–12.30

ROBINA HODGSON

Bombshells and Bedbugs

What was life like for a soldier in the Great War? Find out in this interactive workshop led by Robina Hodgson of the Imperial War Museum. Using a historical collection of uniforms, weapons, personal belongings and artwork from the IWM, Robina will describe the day-to-day life of conscript soldiers and officers in the trenches during the Great War. There will be the opportunity to handle artefacts such as uniforms and gas masks, and participants will be encouraged to think about how people record their experiences in letters, diaries and poetry, linking this to the ‘Dream Voices’ exhibition.

For children of 12 years and upwards, with accompanying adults.

Admission free, but pre-booking essential: telephone 01223 766766 from Monday 6 September.

This event is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas:

http://www.drc.admin.cam.ac.uk/whatson/ideasfestival/detail.shtml?uid=ideasfestival2010%3A856

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By John, October 21, 2010 9:45 am

Siegfried Sassoon matriculated at Cambridge University on 21 October 1905, the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and a hundred and five years ago today. The event is recorded in two documents held in the Cambridge University Archives kept here in the University Library: the matriculations register and Sassoon’s student record card. They raise a curious doubt about the spelling of his name.

The generally accepted, ‘correct’ spelling of Sassoon’s middle name is ‘Loraine’, although it’s not uncommon to see it given two ‘r’s, as though the poet had a connection with the region in North-Eastern France. In fact the origin of the name was more parochial, as his biographers explain. Max Egremont writes that it derived from his mother Theresa’s ‘respect for a High Church clergyman, Canon Loraine’, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson adds the detail that it was ‘chosen as a tribute to the clergyman who had advised Hamo [Thornycroft, Sassoon’s uncle] and Theresa when they were organizing her clandestine marriage in January 1884 and who was presumably Siegfried’s godfather.’ John Stuart Roberts says that Loraine had prepared Theresa for confirmation and remained a source of spiritual guidance.

The only Anglican clergyman with the surname of either Loraine or Lorraine in the 1880s was Nevison Loraine, author of The Voice of the Prayer-Book, The Sceptic’s Creed: Can it be Reasonably Held? Is it Worth the Holding?, The Battle of Belief, and other works in a similar vein. From 1872 until his death in 1917 Loraine was Vicar of St Paul’s Church in Chiswick, where Sassoon’s maternal family had connections. He became a canon in 1907, when he was given the Chiswick prebend of St Paul’s Cathedral.

When I first looked at Sassoon’s student record card (in CUA Graduati 32), I noticed immediately that the middle name was ‘misspelt’:

Siegfried Sassoon's Cambridge University record card (CUA Graduati 32)

I assumed this was a simple scribal error until I turned to the Matriculation Register (CUA Matr. 19). Unlike on the record cards, which were compiled by clerks, the names in the register are the actual signatures of the students concerned: and Sassoon himself used the spelling ’Lorraine’.

Cambridge University Matriculation register (CUA Matr. 19)

It is unlikely that the names on the record cards were transcribed from the register, so presumably the clerk was working from another source which had the ‘double r’ spelling too. The Admissions Book at Clare College also has ‘Lorraine’, although, like the record card, this is not in Sassoon’s own handwriting. Sassoon seems not to have known how Father Loraine spelt his surname, at least at this period. A copy of Sassoon’s will in MS Add. 9852/5, dating from 1929, uses ‘Loraine’, which shows that his solicitors took care on this point even if the young undergraduate did not. 

The matriculation register is also interesting in showing that Siegfried signed ahead of his younger brother Hamo, who matriculated on the same day, also as a member of Clare College. The names in the registers were ordered strictly alphabetically within each college, so Hamo’s signature should have preceded Siegfried’s. Of course mistakes can always happen, as the mix-up between Stirling and Stringer on the same page shows.

Sassoon’s student record card testifies to his lack of progress at Cambridge. His ‘Rank in College’ is shown by the ‘P’, standing for ‘Pensioner’, defined as a student paying fees to his or her college for teaching and for board and lodging. The only information regarding examinations taken comes in the column headed ‘Previous’. The Previous examination, or ‘Little-go’, was a test of knowledge of classical languages and William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (and for honours candidates, mathematics). Established in the 1820s, the examination was originally sat in an undergraduate’s second year at the University, but by Sassoon’s day it was more commonly tackled in the months preceding a student’s arrival: in Sassoon’s case, the Lent and Easter terms of 1905. In Seven More Years, Sassoon described his time at Henley House, the ‘first-class cramming establishment’ he attended to prepare for the exam, and how he bicycled through the Kentish landscape ‘with bits of Paley disporting themselves in my head.’ The lack of annotation in the right-hand columns of the card, reserved for Tripos (degree exam) results and dates of graduation, is silent testimony to Sassoon’s self-acknowledged inaptitude for academic study.

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By John, October 15, 2010 9:49 am

The title-page of Sassoon's early publication Sonnets and Verses.

As part of the University’s Festival of Ideas, Alison Hennegan (Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall) will be giving a talk in the Library on Thursday 21 October titled ‘A War Poet in the Making?: Siegfried Sassoon’s Pre-War Writings’.

Sassoon had already published ten books before the Great War began. The talk will explore continuities between his youthful writings and the war poems for which he remains best known.

The event will take place in the Morison Room in the University Library’s West Road building. There will be a special display of Sassoon’s early publications on view from 17.00 onwards, and the talk will begin at  17.30, lasting around an hour. Admission is free, but pre-booking is essential: online at http://festivalofideaswarpoet.eventbrite.com/, or call the Festival of Ideas team on 01223 766766.

Adrian Barlow will be giving a talk on Sassoon to the Friends of the Library on 9 November — more about that later.

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By John, October 11, 2010 12:15 pm

It isn’t just the University Library which holds Sassoon material in Cambridge: two of the constituent colleges of the University, King’s and St John’s, do too, as the second link in Zoe’s ‘Outline online’ post below demonstrates. The ‘Autograph letters and poems of Siegfried Sassoon’ held in St John’s with the reference ‘Miscellaneous Papers SA4’ are of particular interest to us here in the UL, since they directly complement documents in our MS Add. 9192, a set of autograph scores by the composer Cyril Bradley Rootham (1875–1938), transferred from the Pendlebury Library of Music in 1993. Rootham was appointed Organist at St John’s College in 1901 and made a Fellow in 1914, retaining these posts until his death.

Most of the letters and poems in SA4 were sent by Sassoon to Rootham shortly after the end of the First World War. The two men met in Cambridge in January 1919 while Sassoon was on a visit to William Rivers, his mentor at the Craiglockhart War Hospital hospital in 1917, who was a Fellow of St John’s. Although neglected nowadays, in his time Rootham was a leading figure in the musical life of the University, and a respected composer, principally of choral works and songs. The relationship between poet and musician has been largely passed over by Sassoon’s biographers, but entries in Sassoon’s published diaries show that he attended a performance of Rootham’s opera The Two Sisters in Cambridge in February 1922, and in June that year Rootham arranged the music for Rivers’s funeral in the chapel of St John’s, at which Sassoon was present.

Short lyrics of the kind written by Sassoon lent themselves to the English song tradition and, after their introduction by Rivers, he and Rootham proceeded to co-operate on settings of a number of poems. The finding aid to the St John’s collection (http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FMiscellaneous%2FSA4) indicates that Sassoon sent Rootham autograph and typescript versions of several of the poems from Picture Show, his privately printed volume which appeared in the summer of 1919, and of these, three are represented by scores in MS Add. 9192: ‘Butterflies’, ‘Idyll’ and ‘Everyone Sang’.

Cover sheet of Rootham's setting of 'Everyone Sang'. MS Add. 9192.95(7)

A score of the last of these, MS Add. 9192.95(7), was dated ‘May 24, 1919 at Cambridge’, so Rootham had set the poem before its first publication.

The last staves of Rootham's setting of 'Everyone Sang'. MS Add. 9192.95(7)

The Picture Show settings were published as Three Song-Pictures by Siegfried Sassoon, set to music by Cyril Bradley Rootham by West’s of London in 1920. Four further Sassoon poems set by Rootham were published by Curwen in the following year: ‘A Child’s Prayer’, ‘Morning Glory’, ‘A Poplar and the Moon’ and ‘South Wind’. Of these, there are scores for ‘Morning Glory’ and ‘South Wind’ in MS Add. 9192. In a diary entry for 11 March 1921 Sassoon recorded receiving copies of the settings of ‘A Child’s Prayer’ and ‘South Wind’, which, he wrote, ‘pleased me; so the day ended fairly well’. All seven songs were republished by Stainer & Bell in 1990, edited by Kenneth Shenton, who in his Introduction said of them that ‘though contrasted in mood, [they] offer many characteristics of Rootham’s mature style. Within his music there is a deep lyrical trait which is allied to a dynamic energy, so typical of the man. Typical also is the imagery in which natural life and physical elements are transmuted into a directness which evokes the essence of the human mood. Such imagery is much in evidence in these lovely settings.’

Rootham seems not to have published any settings of Sassoon after 1921, but he worked on four further poems in 1926: ‘Before Day’, ‘Morning-Land’, ‘Noah’ and ‘Tree and Sky’. Manuscripts of these scores are also found in MS Add. 9192. In another manuscript transferred to the UL from the Pendlebury Library, MS Add. 9105, there are holograph sketches by Rootham of settings of two poems from the sequence The Heart’s Journey (‘While I seek you, far away…’ and ‘I cannot pray with my head…’), although as Rootham acknowledged in a list of contents, these amount to a ‘few notes only’. The sketches are undated, but the inclusion of ‘I cannot pray with my head…’ suggests the texts may have been taken from the first ‘ordinary’ edition of The Heart’s Journey, which appeared in 1928, and not the limited edition of the previous year, which omitted the poem.

‘Music is a thing I can’t do without for long!’, Sassoon told another Cambridge musician, Edward Dent, in a letter of 1915. The manuscripts in St John’s Miscellaneous Papers SA4 and the UL’s MS Add. 9192 cast an interesting light on a brief but fruitful artistic collaboration.