BEFORE OCTOBER 1906 was out, Brooke was living away from home for the first time as an undergraduate of King’s College, at Cambridge University. The King’s College of St Nicholas in Cambridge was established by Henry VI in 1440, the monarch giving thanks ‘to the honour of Almighty God, in whose hand are the hearts of Kings; of the most blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary Mother of Christ, and also of the glorious Confessor and Bishop Nicholas, Patron of my intended college, on whose festival we first saw the light’. In imitation of William Wykeham (founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford), the King immediately closely connected his college with the King’s College of Blessed Mary of Eton beside Windsor. The King’s Chapel is a breathtakingly unique piece of architecture, surrounded by later work from eminent architects such as William Wilkins, Sir Gilbert Scott and Sir George Boldy. Until 1857, just half a century too early for Rupert, King’s College students had the right to claim degrees without examination. He became one of some fifty freshmen to join the 100 or so established King’s men, and was allotted Room 14 (actually two rooms) at the top of staircase A, in Fellows’ Buildings, almost in the far corner of the front court – rooms that had been occupied by the artist Aubrey Beardsley some seventeen years before. Rupert had once written to his cousin Erica, while still at school, suggesting that she acquired and absorb ‘one third of Swinburne, all Oscar Wilde, and the drawings of Beardsley’.

Brooke had won a scholarship to King’s, where his uncle Alan Brooke was Dean of the college, as his father had done before him. As with Rupert’s schooldays under his father, no favours were asked for, nor expected, except that an arrangement was reached that he would call on his uncle for tea on Saturday afternoons. At an initial, more formal meeting with the Dean he met and became friendly with Hugh Dalton, later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the mid-1940s. Discovering that they had much in common, Brooke and Dalton, the son of a canon of Windsor, agreed to form a society where they could discuss such mutual interests as poetry, politics and any other subjects that took their fancy, deciding on the name ‘Carbonari’ (the charcoal burners) after the nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries.

Brooke also fraternised with old Rugbeians who had gone up to Cambridge, Hugh Russell-Smith, Geoffrey Keynes and Andrew Gow, and found (as he had in St John Lucas at Rugby) another literary mentor, in the 42-year-old university librarian Charles Sayle, known as ‘Aunt Snayle’. Brooke was later to write in his diary on 22 February 1908: ‘I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man … great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm.’

Other Cambridge men with whom Rupert became close friends were Justin Brooke, who had come up to Emmanuel in 1904 and was a leading light in the university’s dramatic circle, and Jacques Raverat, a Frenchman from Prunoy who had arrived at Cambridge from university at the Sorbonne, Paris, having previously been at Bedales School with Justin. Raverat had this to say of Rupert:

During his first year at King’s, Rupert took time to glance over his shoulder at the past: ‘I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I looked back at five years I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious and I could not and cannot hope for, as even quite imagine, such happiness elsewhere.’ The man later to become another literary mentor, Edward Marsh, a high-ranking civil servant and former Cambridge graduate who was to fly the flag for Brooke’s poetry and would bring him together with many other leading poets, was to say of Brooke’s time at School Field, ‘He loved the house and garden, especially his own particular long grass-path, where he used to walk up and down reading.’ Brooke showed misgivings about leaving Rugby for King’s: ‘I shall live in Cambridge very silently, in a dark corner of a great room … I shall never speak, but I shall read all day and night – philosophy or science – nothing beautiful any more.’

Once at Cambridge, he soon began to orchestrate a suitable image. To Keynes he confided:

Although Rupert made no great claims to be an actor, his looks and charisma drew him to the attention of the university dramatic societies. Via Justin Brooke, and fourth-year King’s man A. E. Scholfield, Rupert landed the non-speaking role of the Herald in The Eumenides, which was being produced by the Greek play committee. It was in this production that he first made an impression on Eddie Marsh, who was in the audience. Following his triumph in The Eumenides, Brooke became a college pin-up. Winston Churchill’s cousin Sir Shane Leslie later wrote in an article for Tatler about him:

This side of him was shielded from his mother, to whom he wrote from King’s of other matters: ‘I am going to see the South Africans, if they play, tomorrow. As it has been raining for a week they will probably have a wet ball and be handicapped considerably, but I suppose we shan’t beat them. I have an atrocious but cheap seat right behind the goal-posts.’ This was the Springboks’ first ever visit to the British Isles, rugby having been introduced there just thirty years earlier. He also informed her about his new neighbour Oscar Browning, the historian and fellow of King’s already in his seventieth year, who had rooms just opposite Rupert’s: ‘I went to lunch with the “OB” on Sunday. He was rather quaint to watch but I did not much like him. He was so very egotistical, and a little dull.’ If James Strachey had similar views, they didn’t appear to deter him from being sexually submissive to Browning, who would have sexual intercourse with him, accompanied by a string quartet of elderly ladies, secreted behind a curtain!

In January 1907, Rupert was ill in bed at Rugby with a bout of influenza which had hit the family; his mother and elder brother Richard were also down with it. He described his ailments in letters to Geoffrey Keynes and Erica Cotterill, writing to the latter enclosing a new poem that he had just written: ‘To make up for all this bosh, I shall copy out for you the wonderfullest sonnet of the century. But if you show it to respectable people they’ll kill you.’ Some four and a half years after his original handwritten verses were secretly read by Erica, they were published in Poems 1911 as ‘The Vision of Archangels’ and would sit on the bookshelves of the ‘respectable people’ he once feared might blanche at them.

On Sunday 13 January, Richard died of pneumonia, with his father Parker Brooke by his side. The family was devastated and Rupert was feeling ‘terribly despondent and sad … there is an instinct to hide in sorrow, and at Cambridge where I know nowhere properly I can be alone’. He also felt that his father was ‘tired and broken by it’. He offered to stay at School Field for a while, but his parents felt they could cope. Rupert went back to Cambridge and very gradually life began to return to normal.

As Brooke became increasingly involved with student life, he began to contribute poems and reviews to the Cambridge Review, as well as playing Stingo in the Amateur Dramatic Club’s (ADC) production of Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental comedy, She Stoops to Conquer. His first poem to be printed while at King’s was ‘The Call’, in February 1907.

Having found his feet and many new friends, and established his popularity, the Brooke of 1907 was a quantum leap from the freshman of 1906 who had written to St John Lucas on his arrival, ‘this place is rather funny to watch; and a little wearying. It is full of very young people, and my blear eyes look dolefully at them from the lofty window where I sit and moan … my room is a gaunt yellow wilderness.’

On top of Rupert’s dramatic commitment and studies, he was writing poetry and reviewing it. He confessed to St John Lucas, ‘in my “literary life” I have taken the last step of infamy and become – a reviewer! I have undertaken to “do” great slabs of minor poetry for the Cambridge Review … Cambridge is terrible, slushy and full of un-Whistlerian mists.’

Rupert’s increasing enthusiasm for exploring England took him along the South Downs of Sussex through the sleepy villages of Amberley, Arundel, Duncton and Petworth and along the River Arun in a walking tour with Hugh Russell-Smith, which he picturesquely embellished in a letter to St John Lucas: ‘[W]e slew a million dragons and wandered on unknown hills. We met many knights and I made indelicate songs about them.’ This was the heart of Hilaire Belloc country: Belloc had started many of his own walking tours from his house, Kings Land at Shipley. It must have crossed Brooke’s mind to call unsolicited; even though he did not, the two were to meet within a couple of months. The marathon ramble ended at the Green Dragon, Market Lavington, over the Easter weekend of 1907, during which time Rupert was proclaiming himself, through Hugh Dalton’s influence, a committed Fabian and was allegedly trying to write Fabian hymns, although one suspects they were more fancy than fact, as Rupert had little musical talent. For one who was so taken with the image and character of Belloc – who would write many songs while walking the downs and the Arun Valley, through which Brooke had just travelled – if he were trying to compose, it would undoubtedly be in Belloc style. Possibly something in the vein of Belloc’s ‘On Sussex Hills’.

Brooke and Belloc eventually met at King’s in the spring of 1907:

During May, Brooke played many games for King’s Cricket XI, under the captaincy of H. F. P. Hearson, returning bowling figures of three wickets for sixteen runs against Queen’s on 16 May, one of thirteen matches played during a four-week period. The following month the King’s College magazine Basileon printed three of Brooke’s poems: ‘Dawn’, ‘The Wayfarers’ and ‘My Song’.

At the beginning of June, while knee-deep in exams and late nights, Brooke was informed by the Chapel Clerk that he had to read in chapel every morning that week, at the un-student-like hour of 8.00 a.m. However, a respite from duties came in the shape of the summer vacation, which ran from June to October. Chapel, drama, studies and his new life were put on hold while he went to stay at Grantchester Dene in Bournemouth, with his aunts Lizzy and Fanny. The latter was at one time the honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society for the parish, and insisted on Rupert accompanying her and her sister to the local Holy Trinity Church when he stayed with them. While at his aunts’ house, he pored over maps to find somewhere suitable to go off to with friends for a few days, and was captivated by the name of the Mupe Rocks near Lulworth Cove, Dorset. Later that month he wrote to his old schoolfriend Hugh Russell-Smith, ‘You know I always like to keep you au fait (as our Gallic neighbours would have it) with my latest literary activity. This came to me as I was sitting by the sea the other day I don’t know what it was – perhaps it was the rhythm of the waves. But I felt I must sing. So I sang:

A week or two later Brooke dashed off a few flippant lines of verse to Andrew Gow:

Later in June, he described the atmosphere at Grantchester Dene to St John Lucas:

The intriguingly named Mupe Rocks hadn’t been forgotten. It transpired that they were at Bacon Hole, a little east of Lulworth Cove. Rupert informed Hugh Russell-Smith, who was to holiday with him,

Unbeknown to Rupert, Emily Jane Chaffey was barely able to read or write, so her communications with him about the holiday arrangements were, in the light of that knowledge, highly commendable. She had been so illiterate at the time of her wedding to Henry J. Chaffey that she had signed her marriage certificate with a cross.

Rupert and Russell-Smith were joined there by a new friend who was also studying at Cambridge, Dudley Ward. In his excitement Brooke exclaimed to a friend: ‘In a week I’m going to the most beautiful place in England, Lulworth Cove.’ Brooke, of course, wasn’t the first wordsmith to wax lyrical about the village of West Lulworth. John Leland, the earliest chronicler of Lulworth and chaplain, librarian and antiquary to Henry VIII, wrote:

The area is one of natural beauty; the rocks which form the cove, Stair Hole, and the surrounding coastline are over 150 million years old, fossils having been found there that predate the evolution of reptiles and birds. To the east is the Isle of Purbeck, a spectacular ridge of chalk hills that were once continuous with the Isle of Wight, while to the west are rugged cliffs, including Durdle Door, the more inaccessible crags providing ideal nesting grounds for puffins and guillemots. Not surprisingly, the natural beauty and idyllic charm of Lulworth has attracted its fair share of artists and writers, including John O’Keefe, who stayed at the Red Lion, now Churchfield House, for six weeks in 1791, Sir John Everett Millais, who is reputed to have painted his Departure of the Romans from Britain at Oswald’s Wall, and John Keats, who is believed to have written his sonnet ‘Bright Star’ while berthed in the cove. Thomas Hardy, who lived at Bockhampton and Dorchester from 1890 to 1928, used a thinly disguised Lulworth in several of his novels; Bertrand Russell often stayed at Newlands Farm between 1916 and 1934; and actor Laurence Olivier would spend his first honeymoon there at a house called Weston. Brooke was yet to meet and fall in love with Olivier’s cousin, Noel.

On 21 July 1907 Rupert wrote to his mother from the Chaffeys’ post office at Albion Villas, West Lulworth:

The lines written to his mother differ wildly from the contents of a letter the same day to Geoffrey Keynes, written with deliberate affectation:

Four years later he discovered that Lulworth was the last place in England that Keats had been to, before going to Italy. Brooke’s stay at Lulworth inspired five untitled verses, which feel as if they should be sung. Again one feels the influence of Belloc creeping in.

On 8 July he wrote ‘Pine Trees and the Sky: Evening’, while at Lulworth.

After Lulworth, Rupert headed up to the Russell-Smiths at Brockenhurst, writing from there to St John Lucas, on 4 August. He again affected a different stance and writing style, attempting to convey a world-weariness beyond his years. He clearly adored the Russell-Smiths, but wrote with obvious exaggeration and suitable embellishment:

Rupert was spared the fifty dull years, as within eight, he, Hugh and Hugh’s brother Denham, would all be dead, and Brockenhurst church where the Russell-Smiths worshipped would fill rapidly with First World War graves. For now, though, no shadow cast itself over the exuberant years of youth, where the summers seemed longer than the winters, and the countryside was there for the taking.

His travels around the south of England during the summer of 1907 included a stay with the Cotterills at Godalming. In his bedroom there he found a copy of William Morris’s Utopian classic, News From Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest, a book which he had never read, but which had been on his list to track down ever since fellow student Ben Keeling had told him that a poster in his rooms at Cambridge had been inspired by it. The poster depicted a worker with clenched fist and the legend, ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’. Morris’s book and the piece of vivid artwork and slogan were to inspire Brooke to write in 1908 his only socialist poem, ‘Second Best’.

Second Best

Of William Morris’s book he said, ‘I found News From Nowhere in my room and read it on and on all through the night till I don’t know what time! And ever since I’ve been a devoted admirer of Morris and a socialist, and all sorts of things!’ Rupert was allowed to keep his uncle’s copy. Although the Utopian ideas it embraced were delightfully idealistic, he wholeheartedly embraced Morris’s socialist ideology in his day-to-day life.