RUPERT’S RETURN TO King’s in the autumn of 1907 saw his pen in vitriolic mood towards the university town: ‘Cambridge is less tolerable than ever’; ‘I pine to be out of Cambridge, which I loathe’, ‘Cambridge is a bog’, ‘in Cambridge the hard streets are paven with brass and glass and tired wounded feet of pilgrims flutter aimlessly upon them’. In a letter to his cousin Erica he was also disparaging about George Bernard Shaw: ‘[I]t was the same speech as he made the night before in London and the night after, somewhere. Mostly about the formation of a “middle-class party” in Parliament: which didn’t interest me much.’

As well as being a member of the Carbonari and acting in the ADC, Brooke became a co-founder of the Marlowe Society, formed with the object of staging Elizabethan plays. By October, the finishing touches were being put to their debut production, Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, due to be performed on Monday 11 November, and Tuesday 12 November. Rupert was not only playing the part of Mephistopheles but had agreed to take on the role of President of the Society. Among the first-night audience were Prince Leopold of Belgium, the former Cambridge don E. J. Dent, and Rupert’s mother. Hugh Russell-Smith played one of the Seven Deadly Sins, Gluttony; Geoffrey Keynes, the Evil Angel; Justin Brooke, Doctor Faustus; W. Denis Browne, Rugby’s star music pupil, Lucifer; and George Mallory, who was later to lose his life on Everest, the Pope. The chorus was directed by Clive Carey, of Clare College.

Later that month, Brooke was elected to the Fabian Society, as an associate member. As such he had not as yet signed the Basis (a commitment to the party), but his interest in politics was increasing. His Uncle Clem, an advanced socialist, had just published Human Justice for Those at the Bottom; An Appeal to Those at the Top, prompting Brooke to write to him, while staying with his aunts in Bournemouth, with the news that socialism was making great advances at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He had read his uncle’s book and wondered whether ‘this Commercialism or Competition or whatever the filthy infection is, hasn’t spread almost too far, and that the best hope isn’t in some kind of upheaval’. Despite being

The one Society that was decidedly ambivalent about Brooke was the Apostles. Founded in 1820 by a group of friends dedicated to working out a philosophy for life, its hierarchy would mark out suitable young men, undergraduates mainly from Trinity and King’s, to swell its ranks by two or three a year – if that. The Society was intimate, secretive and often predominantly homosexual. ‘Born’ into the inner circle at various times before Brooke’s day were: Bertrand Russell, Eddie Marsh, Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, Leonard Woolf, Oscar Browning, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Lytton Strachey. James Strachey had suggested Rupert to Lytton as a possible candidate, before Brooke even came up. The Society meetings, invariably on Saturday evenings, were often graced by the occasional appearance of an ‘angel’ or retired Apostle, but it was Lytton and Maynard Keynes who were the main deliberators in the decision as to whether to enlist Brooke. Lytton felt that Rupert’s influences at Rugby – Arthur Eckersley and St John Lucas – had not helped his literary style, expression or quality of thought, and the idea that the young Rugbeian had not read the novels of the celebrated American writer Henry James was too abhorrent to Strachey for him to further consider the application.

It was at this time that Lytton, who had met Brooke briefly, dubbed him ‘Sarawak’, as there was some talk of his family being related to James Brooke, the British administrator who became the ‘White Rajah of Sarawak’. This led to Brooke referring to his mother as ‘The Ranee’, a nickname that he was to use for the rest of his life.

By 30 October 1907, Maynard Keynes, too, was still undecided about electing Rupert to the Apostles. Of the others who were in on the discussion, Harry Norton didn’t really know Brooke, although he’d met him briefly, Jack Sheppard was faintly opposed, while James Strachey was enthusiastic. Maynard wrote to Lytton: ‘I’m damned if I know what to say. James’s judgements on the subject are very nearly worthless; he is quite crazy. I have been to see R. again. He is all right I suppose and quite affable enough – but yet I feel little enthusiasm.’ During November, Rupert went to Oxford with the Fabians, for a debate at the university. Despite referring to his own party as ‘an indecorous, aesthetical, obscene set of ruffians’, Brooke was elected by a large majority to the committee. He was also elected, in January 1908, to the Apostles. He was the first new member for two years, and membership meant membership for life, to a fraternity that hermetically sealed itself from outside forces. This led to, or was often because of, the insecurities of many of its members – brilliant intellectuals, who were often awkward in day-to-day situations or with ordinary people. For some, membership of the Apostles became a way of life; for Rupert there was a wider world waiting.

Strachey, as well as being an Apostle, was also a member of the Bloomsbury group, a circle of friends who’d begun meeting a couple of years previously at the Bloomsbury home of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. The arts-orientated coterie would include among others Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf, several of whom would figure in Brooke’s life, although he would never be a member of their circle.

During the Christmas break, he went with friends on a skiing holiday in Andermatt, staying at Danioth’s Grand Hotel; while there they rehearsed and performed Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Then he went back to the grind of exams and his continued disenchantment with living in Cambridge. His apparent despondency continued into 1908: a letter to St John Lucas ended with the gripe, ‘I pine to be out of Cambridge which I loathe’, and to Jacques Raverat he wrote:

These exaggerated lines, intended to amuse or create a dramatic air for his friend to marvel at, are earthed by the line, ‘I have a cold.’

In early April, Brooke escaped from Cambridge to Torquay to read Greek for Walter Headlam – a fellow of King’s – who had introduced Brooke to the plays of John Webster and the poetry of John Donne. Headlam was to become a friend and mentor. Brooke’s lodgings were on the east side of the bay at 3 Beacon Terrace, facing Beacon Quay.

Beacon Hill itself had been quarried away during the 1860s to provide the requisite limestone to infill the new Haldon Pier – not surprisingly causing a storm of protest from the locals. The pier had been completed by 1870. Beacon Terrace itself, hard by Beacon Hill, had been completed in 1833, when it was deemed to be ‘a fine example of Regency marine building, with its crisp stucco facade and projecting cast-iron balconies’. In Brooke’s day the Bath Saloons, originally the Medical Baths, were to his left, looking from his apartment window, and a little nearer stood the Electricity Generating Station, inaugurated in March 1898 – not pretty, although not blocking this view over the bay. At the time of Brooke’s stay in Torquay, the town had just changed its public transport system from fifteen-seater steam buses to trams, and the town’s first public library had just opened.

On 8 April, Rupert wrote from Beacon Terrace to Hugh Dalton, a devout Fabian, about his decision to sign the Fabian Basis: ‘I have decided to sign even the present Fabian Basis and to become a member (if possible) of the central Fabian society. The former part I suppose may wait till next term, as I have no Basis with me, spiritually, the thing is done (not without blood and tears).’ During his ten-day sojourn in Torquay he was moved to take time out from his political thoughts and Greek studies to write the sonnet ‘Seaside’.

Highlights of his stay there were an invitation from his cousin Erica, who had asked him to go with her to see George Bernard Shaw’s new play, Getting Married, the following month at the Haymarket Theatre in London, and a play of hers that she had sent to him. He replied, ‘Thanks for the play. Its market value would be higher if you had written “from the authoress to her adorable cousin” or words to that effect, inside. I carry it about with me and sit on it at intervals, so that it often lies quite flat now.’ His thoughts were also on a chance meeting and conversation he had with the author H. G. Wells in London, en route to Torquay. He was more than happy to let his friends know about it, including the fact in letters to both Hugh Dalton and Geoffrey Keynes, to whom he wrote, ‘Shall you be in London on Thursday or Wednesday? I am at my club. Last time I was at it I met Wells and talked with him – a month ago. Did I tell you? If not, you’re a bright, bright green.’ In the same letter, written from 3 Beacon Terrace on 17 April, he wrote, ‘I am not a poet – I was, that’s all. And I never, ah! never was a superman – God forbid.’ The sea brought back fond memories of Lulworth, necessitating a postcard to Geoffrey, who was staying there: ‘I hope you’re still there [Lulworth Cove]. Give my love to the whole lot, downs and all, and especially the left-handed boy, who dwells in the coastguards’ cottages, and the village idiot, and all the Williamses.’

From Torquay Rupert returned to the inn on the western edge of Salisbury Plain, where he and Hugh Russell-Smith had stayed during a walking tour the previous Easter. This time the Green Dragon at Market Lavington was the venue for a gathering organised by Geoffrey Keynes’s eldest brother Maynard, later to become one of the century’s most eminent economists. Among those present were Desmond MacCarthy, hailed as his generation’s greatest drama critic, Lytton Strachey and the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose revolutionary ethical concepts were woven into his Principia Ethica, published in the autumn of 1903. The novelist E. M. Forster was also present, and that Brooke was reading his ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ at the time was either an interesting coincidence or well-organised public relations by Rupert. The weather was bitter and the food ghastly, according to Strachey, but it clearly didn’t deter Moore from accompanying himself on the piano. He sang many of Schubert’s songs during the temporary lulls in a weekend that swung from intellectual jousting to overt flirtation, in the maze of lofty rooms with their fine views towards the Plain and along the narrow high street. Brooke was younger than the others at the gathering, and one wonders whether the invitation would still have been forthcoming if he hadn’t looked as he did. He appeared to cope with the homosexual proclivities of many of the Apostles, without either becoming involved or being rejected for not doing so.

In May 1908, a shaft of sunlight fell on King’s when Brooke met Noel Olivier, the youngest daughter (then fifteen) of Sir Sydney Olivier, the Governor of Jamaica, at a dinner held in Ben Keeling’s rooms in his honour. The dinner guests included H. G. Wells, Newnham students Amber Reeves and Dorothy Osmaston, and Noel’s sister Margery. Rupert and Noel got on famously and he was clearly taken with her, the young girl becoming the object of his affections for several years. Her family lived at Limpsfield Chart, in Surrey, where she and her three sisters, Bryn, Daphne and Margery, would often spend all day in the local woods and fields leading a tomboy existence. The fact that Noel was still a schoolgirl (at Bedales in Hampshire) did not deter Brooke from pursuing her with dogged determination.

After finding a little time for sport – ‘I had my first game of tennis and found myself quite bad’ – the majority of his time was taken up with the organisation of a production of John Milton’s Comus, which was to be staged at the New Theatre in Cambridge to celebrate the poet John Milton’s tercentenary. Brooke played the Attendant Spirit and stage-managed the production. The organisation was indeed enormous. He dealt with H. and M. Rayne, the theatrical stores opposite Waterloo Station: ‘We received your letter today and note you require seventeen more animal masks … we cannot give you a definite price until we have seen the sketches.’ They also offered him ‘anything in Wigs, Tights, Shoes, or Costumes.’ In mid-June, there was a flurry of letters and post-office telegraphs between Rupert and the set designer Albert Rothenstein, who informed him, ‘You will see from the drawing that it is perfectly possible to make use of scaffold or telegraph poles as trees,’ and, ‘When ordering clothes don’t forget they must be sized and prepared for working on.’ Rothenstein, groggy from having had his tonsils removed a few days before, was still full of enthusiasm: ‘Don’t forget that we shall want two Back Cloths, ready primed and prepared for painting on.’ Brooke’s workload was eased mentally by the workforce being joined by Noel Olivier, on holiday from Bedales. The telegrams, letters and notes increased as members of the cast checked rehearsal times, sent apologies for absence and made endless enquiries.

Comus had first been presented in the Great Hall at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1634, with music by Henry Lawes, who, like Brooke, played the Attendant Spirit. Lawes, born in Salisbury in 1600, and a close friend of Milton, is credited with having been the first musician to introduce the Italian style of music into England. As the Spirit, Brooke had the task of handling both the prologue and the epilogue, so the first words the audience would hear would be Rupert’s, declaring:

Francis Cornford, a 33-year-old don, undertook the title role. It was during rehearsals for Comus that fellow student Frances Darwin, a granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin, who was to later marry Cornford, composed her famous lines on Brooke:

Although she later rather regretted having written it, Brooke himself confessed to not minding the Apollo image. Those two words of hers, ‘young Apollo’, were to change people’s perception of Rupert for decades. In 1953, thirty-eight years after his death she wrote:

Frances saw Brooke as the pivotal figure in their circle of friends, which in effect he had become, having learned the knack of how to be the centre of attention and the central attraction. Bizarrely, he made all those associated with Comus solemnly promise that they wouldn’t get engaged or married during or within six months of the production – nonsense, of course, and impossible to impose upon anyone. In fact, Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford were the first to break the so-called pact by getting engaged.

Comus, using the original music by Lawes, was repeated at a public matinee on the following day at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Ticket prices ranged from one to three shillings. The reviews for the first night were mixed, though Lytton Strachey, writing kindly of it in The Spectator, felt that it was ‘happily devoid of those jarring elements of theatricality and false taste which too often counterbalance the inherent merits of a dramatic revival’.

Scott and Wilkinson, photographers who were based at Camden Studio adjoining the New Theatre, Cambridge, wrote to Rupert asking him to ‘make an appointment with us to be photographed in your character in Milton’s Comus’. They added that the photographer would ‘consider it a personal favour’ if Brooke would be willing to pose for them. He posed. The production of Comus was a major feather in Brooke’s cap: the Milton tercentenary celebration was attended by such luminaries as the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Robert Bridges, who was to become Laureate after Austin’s death five years later, the author Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and Thomas Hardy. The production was followed by a dance at Newnham Grange with the whole cast in costume, including Rupert in a rather short, spangled, sky-blue tunic that was far too skimpy to sit down in.

The only shadow cast over the success of Comus was the death, during the dress rehearsals, of Brooke’s friend and mentor at King’s, Walter Headlam. who had encouraged him to undertake a production of the play. Headlam had been taken ill while watching a cricket match at Lord’s and later died in hospital of strangulation of the bowels. Rupert was devastated, pouring out his feelings to his mother: ‘[I]t made me feel quite miserable and ill for days … he was the one classic I really admired and liked … what I loved so in him was his extraordinary and loving appreciation of all English poetry.’

In the summer of 1908, Brooke and several of his Cambridge friends, including Hugh Dalton, Noel’s sister Margery, Ben Keeling, Dudley Ward and James Strachey, attended a Fabian summer school on the Welsh coast, in Merionethshire, some 3 miles south of Harlech. The first of the Society’s summer schools in Llanbedr had taken place the year before, following a suggestion by Fabian member Mabel Atkinson after she had been inspired by a German summer school. At the same time, a similar suggestion had arisen, and Frank Lawson Dodd had devised a scheme by which a large house could be procured for the education and recreation of Fabians during the holidays. The Society put their heads together and came up with a solution: Dodd discovered a house at Llanbedr called Pen-yr-Allt (top of the cliff), while Mabel Atkinson laid down a blueprint for an educational programme. A management committee of twelve was formed, all of whom pledged their own money in ten-year loans, at 5 per cent interest. They included George Bernard Shaw and his wife, H. G. Wells, and socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb. On the way to the camp Brooke and the others stayed with Beatrice at Leominster, after which the whole party went to Llanbedr via Ludlow Castle.

Before setting off, Rupert had sent Dalton a postcard claiming he was going to bring ‘a blanket, chocolate and nineteen books, all in a bag’. Dalton carried a torch for Rupert and was always eager to be in his presence, even though his feelings were not returned. Brooke’s rebuffs fired Dalton’s passions to greater heights and, although no relationship was forthcoming, Dalton was still inspired enough to quote Brooke’s poem ‘Second Best’ in his political speeches, both as Labour MP and as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1935. When he went down from Cambridge, he pointedly burned all his correspondence, keeping only communication from Rupert. News of Rupert’s death some seven years later would find Dalton inconsolable and in floods of tears. Thus Brooke moved people. Brooke also repelled James Strachey’s advances and suggestions with gentle humour during the period at Llanbedr.

Pen-yr-Allt became their temporary home for almost a fortnight. The origins of the house go back further than 1869, when a Mr Humphreys converted the old Welsh farmhouse into a fine family residence, complete with its Caernarvon arches, an architectural feature not usually found that far south. It was later inhabited by the Williams family with their seventeen children, before becoming a school. Four years before Brooke’s arrival, another future poet, Robert Graves, attended the establishment for a term, at the age of eight and three-quarters. It was there that Graves chanced upon the first two poems he remembered reading: the early English ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’. Here Graves was caned by the headmaster for learning the wrong collect one Sunday, and was terrified by the head’s daughter and her girlfriend, who tried to find out about the male anatomy by exploring down his shirt. It was not only girls who frightened him: ‘There was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was very overcome by horror at the sight.’ Brooke had the benefit of the same swimming facilities, which were more like a small plunge bath than today’s conception of a pool. The changing hut had a small coal fire, to enable the boys to dry off properly before walking the quarter of a mile back to the house.

During his ten days at Pen-yr-Allt, Rupert attended lectures on Tolstoy and Shaw, long walks, daily exercises and evening dances – a formidable mixture. Fees were set at 35 shillings a week, with half a crown extra for Swedish drill. Despite these, and his comment, ‘Oh, the Fabians, I would to God they’d laugh and be charitable’, Rupert was not deterred from returning the following year. In between studies, there were not only Fabian meetings, football, rugby and cricket matches, drama societies, and poems to write, but also Carbonari gatherings. These are a few entries from Brooke’s Cambridge pocket diary for 1908–9.

    Sat 12 Sept 1908   Cornford
  Tues 20 Oct 1908   G. L. K. [Geoffrey Langdon Keynes]
  Thurs 22 Oct 1908   Carbonari
  Sat 14 Nov 1908   Tea-party – Keynes
  Sun 15 Nov 1908   Supper – Justin
  Mon 7 Dec 1908   Fabians
  Sun 2 May 1909   Darwins 7.45
  Thurs 13 May 1909   Noon – tennis
  Mon 7 June 1909   Picnic

It was at one of the Carbonari gatherings that Brooke was properly introduced to Eddie Marsh, then a civil servant at the colonial office, who had first seen Rupert in 1906 in The Eumenides. A former Apostle of the 1890s and the great-grandson of the assassinated British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, he was extremely well connected both politically and socially and was later to introduce Brooke into the rarefied atmosphere of these circles. At breakfast, the morning after meeting Marsh, Brooke, who had just won a prize in the Westminster Gazette for ‘The Jolly Company’, showed an impressed Marsh his poem, ‘Day That I Have Loved’.

Day That I Have Loved

At the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1908, a Trinity man who had been at Cambridge two years earlier returned for another year. He was Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, who had recently, at a friend’s behest, experimented with using his real surname. He found it an embarrassment, and indeed had dropped the experiment, and by the time he came up again, was using the family’s adopted name. ‘I got to know Rupert Brooke and A. C. Landsberg, and he used to hold poetry recitals in Firbank’s rooms.’

When Wilde’s close friend Robert Ross, who had done much to try to redeem Wilde’s reputation, came to Cambridge on business, Holland and his old Cambridge chum Ronald Firbank threw a supper for him, retaining the menu signed by those present, including Ross and Brooke. They drank Moët et Chandon, 1884.

During 1908, Methuen and Co. published The Westminster Problems Book, which included three of Brooke’s contributions to the problem page of the Westminster Gazette. Two of these were in verse.

While he continued to develop as a poet, his passion for Noel Olivier grew. He became infatuated with her, although a strong will, sense of caution and independence instilled in her by school and family kept him firmly at arm’s length. Her unavailability fanned the flames of desire to such an extent that Rupert even wrote to Dudley Ward on 20 October, ‘Can’t she be kidnapped from Bedales?’

The spirit of the pioneering establishment at which she was studying was to affect Brooke via some of the pupils who passed through it. In 1900, the founder of the co-educational Bedales School, J. H. Badley, moved his expanding establishment from Haywards Heath in Sussex to a new home in Hampshire. A 150-acre site just to the north at Petersfield and close to the village of Steep was selected. It has fine views of the Downs towards Butser and Wardown to the south, while to the north, rising to 800 feet, the beech hangers from Stoner Hill to the Shoulder of Mutton mark it is a dramatic area of England. The main house on the estate, Steephurst, built in 1716, initially housed the seven girls at the school (compared to sixty-seven boys who had their dormitory in another building), while the architect and former pupil, Geoffrey Lupton, designed a new school building as an addition to the establishment. Badley’s creed, still praised by the Bedalians and staff alike in autonomous retrospection, was integrated into his initial prospectus: ‘to develop their powers in a healthy and organic manner rather than to achieve immediate examination results; and thus to lay a sound basis for subsequent specialisations in any given direction. With this view, body, mind and character as subjects for training are regarded as of equal importance!’ Badley, ‘the Chief ’, was, in short, building an alternative to the imperialist sausage machine of the public schools (he, like Brooke, was a Rugbeian), with the focus more on the individual.

Several of the circle that were to become Brooke’s friends were Bedalians -Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat and Noel Olivier – and their way of life and attitude towards it instilled the spirit of the school so strongly in him that he almost felt he had been partially educated there. Bedalian-style camps became a way of life for the group of friends for years. J. H. Badley had laid down the rules for the school camps:

Rupert and Noel formed part of a crowd who went skiing at Klosters, Switzerland, at the end of 1908; the eleven-day holiday cost him 11 guineas, which he was able to borrow from his mother. While there Brooke helped to compose a melodrama, From the Jaws of the Octopus, in which he played the hero, Eugene de Montmorency. They saw the new year in with a whirligig of skiing, tobogganing and youthful exuberance, before Rupert returned to King’s, a round of Carbonari meetings, political and social debates, and to take up his role of president of the Cambridge Fabians for the year 1909–10.

On 9 February, he entertained in his own rooms, with Hilaire Belloc as the main guest and speaker. Belloc was a good catch, as he had already written some twenty-eight books stretching back to 1896, and 1909 would see another five published, including his epic Marie Antoinette. His books were discussed by King Edward VII; and he was the subject of cartoons in Punch. Rupert knew many of Belloc’s poems by heart and certainly some of his songs. The outpourings of the beer-loving Anglophile from La Celle St Cloud in France had far-reaching influences on Brooke’s poems. These lines from Belloc’s ‘West Sussex Drinking Song’ –

– with their naming of places in Sussex and Surrey villages, are not dissimilar in their roots to sections of a poem Brooke would write in 1912, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, in which he used place names local to Cambridge.

As well as Belloc’s words, Brooke was clearly impressed by the exhilarating manner, uproarious humour and powerful gift of speech of this larger-than-life character, who appeared to exist on a diet of beer and cheese.

The Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes was not so much of an influence. Brooke declared his play The Frogs, written around 400 BC, to be a farce after seeing it in Oxford during February 1909, declaring to his mother that it was ‘quite extraordinarily bad’. Notwithstanding his opinion, The Frogs, The Birds and The Wasps, three of Aristophanes most famous plays, have certainly achieved a certain amount of durability!

With the spring approaching, Rupert was temporarily without holiday plans. There were thoughts of Wales, Devon, Cornwall, and even Belgium and Holland, when he realised that he could get from London to Rotterdam for just 13 shillings. ‘In April,’ he declared, ‘I shall be God let loose!’