THE PLAN OF driving a donkey cart through Holland was forgotten as Rupert discovered Becky Falls, on the edge of Dartmoor. On 25 March, he extolled the virtues of the local topography in a letter to his cousin Erica: ‘My view from the window before me includes a lawn, flower-beds with many flowers, a waterfall, rocks and trees, forests, mountains and the sky. It covers some 20 miles of country and no houses.’

From under the shadow of Hound Tor to the south west, Becky, or Becka, Falls, tumbles and plunges some 70 feet over vast granite boulders becoming the Becca Brook, which eventually joins the River Bovey to the east of the Falls. The stamp of the Iron and Bronze Age inhabitants on the area is very marked, with burrows, cairns and hut circles littering an area rich in natural and spectacular beauty. Manaton, a derivation of Maleston – Robert de Maleston having been given the manor by Edward I – is the parish in which the Falls lie, and at the time when Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey and their circle came to write here, there were just 300 or so people living in the area. From late Victorian times Becky Falls farmhouse, with its 60 acres, was occupied by Mr and Mrs Hern and their son Bob, the buildings comprising a sixteenth-century stone farmhouse with three bedrooms, a cowshed, milking parlour and Beechwood cottage, a two-bedroom Victorian structure.

Lytton Strachey was already staying at the Falls at Rupert’s suggestion, when Brooke and Hugh Russell-Smith arrived, following advice that Rupert should terminate his studies of Classics and concentrate on English Literature for his fourth year at Cambridge. Strachey was working on Landmarks in French Literature. In letters to friends, descriptive passages about this part of Devon which he had just discovered flowed from Rupert’s pen, with almost the speed and majesty of the Falls themselves. To Erica he wrote:

And to his close friend Dudley Ward, ‘Here it rains infinitely. But I – I dance through the rain, singing musically snatches of old Greek roundelays. Have you ever seen me in my mackintosh walking-cape dancing 17 miles in the rain?’ Jacques Raverat also received a missive:

The author John Galsworthy lived at Wingston Farm near Manaton for eighteen years until moving into Bury House, Sussex, in 1926. It was here he wrote The Forsyte Saga and other works, but there is no record of Brooke having visited him, although his friend David ‘Bunny’ Garnett did in 1914, just before the outbreak of war.

The Herns, the farmhouse tenants who played host to Brooke, were described by another visitor, Peggy Cornwell: ‘Mr and Mrs Hern were lovely people. Mrs Hern used to come up each morning with a tray of tea for mother and wedges of that home-made bread, spread with clotted cream for us little ones.’ The Herns’ son Bob continued to run the place until the 1950s, when it was described as a ‘large tea garden – set in surroundings of majestic beauty’.

By April 1909, Rupert was further west, at another gathering of the Apostles on the furthest tip of the Lizard, Cornwall. It was essentially a reading party, organised by G. E. Moore, who had been at Trinity with Edward Marsh and had become an Apostle in the early 1890s, at the same time as Bertrand Russell. Moore, in his early thirties at the time of this ‘coming together’ at the Lizard, was certainly a great influence on Brooke, who found the older man’s philosophies and attitude to life absorbing, and his personality infectious, despite his dislike of Fabianism. Moore was also a gifted pianist and singer. Their base, Penmenner House (‘Pen’ meaning headland and ‘menner’ standing stones) is one of Britain’s most southerly houses and was built around 1860 by Thomas Rowe. On his death in 1881, his Irish wife, Grace, lived there until her death in 1914. The eight-bedroomed dwelling that she was running at the time of Brooke’s visit afforded panoramic sea views in all directions and views of the Lizard Lighthouse, as well as access to the path across the cliffs. This idyllic setting proved to be a great attraction to writers. It is said that Oscar Wilde came here to read to the locals, but the members of G. E. Moore’s reading party offered no such public declamations, keeping their philosophies, poetry and readings within the confines of their own circle. Among the Cambridge Apostles at the gathering were the drama critic Desmond Mac-Carthy, barrister and author C. P. Sanger, author Leonard Woolf, poet and playwright R. S. ‘Bob’ Trevelyan (another leading Fabian), James Strachey, and Lytton Strachey. Strachey, some years before, had described the setting of Penmenner House in a letter to his mother as being ‘nose to nose with the sea’. Brooke described the house in a letter from there to Dudley Ward: ‘The house is 12 miles from a station and the posts are said to be irregular.’ To Jacques Raverat he enthused that he went

The bays of Kynance and Housel were just a short stroll from the house, low tide revealing hundreds of rocky outcrops, and at Kynance a beautiful expanse of sandy beach. The extraordinarily warm weather and subsequent swimming activities brought pressure to bear on the desires of James Strachey, who had longed for an active relationship with the uninterested Brooke. James wrote to his brother, Lytton,

After the brief sojourn by the Cornish sea, the peripatetic Brooke was off again, this time to the depths of the New Forest, the main attraction being the presence of the object of his desires, Noel Olivier. Although Brooke’s letters and correspondence from there are headed ‘Bank, Lyndhurst’, the hamlet in which the house Beech Shade is situated is deeper into the forest, past Bank, in a cluster of some half dozen cottages called Gritnam, at the end of a track deep in the forest. Initially discovered by leading Cambridge University socialist Ben Keeling, the area may have been brought to his attention through Virginia Woolf, who stayed at Lane End House in Bank during 1904 and 1905. Bank, and nearby Lyndhurst, attracted many writers during the 1880s, as well as the inspiration for one: Alice Liddell, the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, lived at Bank, after marrying a local man, Reginald Hargreaves. Gritnam, small as it is, is mentioned in the ‘Domesday Book’ as Greteha (the Great Homestead) – its area being ‘half a hide’, some 120 acres, and the whole being held by the romantically named Waleron Hunter.

Noel’s sister Margery had organised a Newhamite reading party at Beech Shade, which included not only Noel, but also Cambridge friends Evelyn Radford and Dorothy Osmaston. The rooms were let to them by Alice Primmer, née Hawkins, and her new husband, former army officer, Harry, who was a stud groom at Wilverly Park, Lyndhurst, at the time of the reading party, later becoming Master of the Hounds before his death in 1925. Learning that Noel would be at Bank, Rupert contrived, through Dudley Ward, who let him know the exact location, to drop in on the party as if by chance. Full of the joys of spring, he recounted his arrival in the New Forest in a letter to Jacques Raverat, liberally spiced with flights of poetic fancy:

Although Margery had been the instigator of the reading party, her presence did not make for an easy passage for Rupert, as a little jealousy, combined with her dual roles of guardian and older sister, meant that she watched over them. Despite that, Noel and Rupert managed walks in the woods together and some time alone, although it seems that his frustration with her ‘cheerful, clear, flat platitudes’ came through clearly at the end of The Voice’, a poem inspired by the few days at Beech Shade.

During the few days at Bank, one of the party was extremely camera-happy – presumably Dorothy Osmaston, as she does not appear in any of the many photographs taken outside Beech Shade.

‘The Voice’ was tidied up and completed at Sidmouth, where Rupert, after his few days in what he termed ‘Arcady’, at last arrived joining his parents and Aunt Fanny at the holiday hotel where they were staying. Aunt Lizzie, with whom Fanny shared Grantchester Dene in Bournemouth, had died on 9 April and this was by way of a recuperative holiday for her.

Long considered a ‘fashionable watering place’ for the wealthy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sidmouth became a health resort for the old and sickly, despite the street being deep in mud during the winter, and carts moving around to lay the dust in the summer. The roadways were made of cracked flints bonded with clay and flattened with a horse-drawn roller, the horses creating their own form of pollution which ended up on the municipal manure dump on Bedford Lawn – on a hot day, too close for comfort to the Esplanade. When Rupert came to the resort at the mouth of the River Sid in April 1909, the fishing fleet had twenty-three ‘drifters’ in which the local fisherman would drift for mackerel; on fine evenings the town turned out to watch them sail away, as Brooke may well have done from his bedroom window at Gloucester House on the Esplanade, a part of York Terrace. The following winter brought a sudden disappearance of the herring, due partly to severe weather and more industrial methods being employed; the fishing industry was never the same again in Sidmouth. During Rupert’s stay, the beach was decorated with a dancing bear, barrel organ, hurdy-gurdy, crab, cockle and nougat vendors, a penny photographer, pony rides and bathing machines.

The rooms Rupert’s parents had taken were often favoured by the actor/manager and builder of His Majesty’s Theatre, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The proprietor of Gloucester House was a Miss Couling and the Brookes’ fellow guests were a Mrs and Miss Sitzer. Rupert stayed from 13 to 20 April. Before he arrived, he wrote to Dudley Ward, ‘If I am going to join my people at Sidmouth (the bloody latest!) on Tuesday morning, pretending to have arrived from Cornwall that moment, I must be up on their last letters to me.’ The elaborate deception seems to have passed off without a hitch, his parents remaining totally oblivious to the fact that he had spent four days in the New Forest.

The visitors list in the Sidmouth Observer mentioned the Brookes staying there for several weeks, the page on which their name appeared also displaying an advertisement for the latest popular air, ‘A New National Song’ called ‘Wake Up England’.

While at Sidmouth Rupert finished a sonnet, the seeds of which had been sown during the three days at Bank. In it his feelings for Noel shine through.

Brooke wrote from Sidmouth to fellow King’s man Geoffrey Fry, who would later be knighted for his work in the Civil Service, ‘yet ‘England, My England’ (Henley) is to use an old-fashioned word, nice’ and, ‘there is a grey sea like this … and a grey sky like this … and I have just read Cymbeline’. On 15 April he wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘Returning on reluctant and bare feet from a long period of fantastic roaming, to the bosom of my sad family in their present seaside resort, I have found documents from King’s that passionately demand my presence earlier than I had thought.’ The following day he wrote to Hugh Dalton:

Other ‘tinsel stars’ associated with Sidmouth included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived there with her family from 1832 in Fortfield Terrace and Cedar Shade (then called Belle Vue), before moving to Wimpole Street in London in 1835. Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray were two other eminent authors with strong Sidmouth connections. Gloucester House where the Brookes stayed is still as much as it was, only no longer bearing the name, and now incorporated into the Royal York and Faulkener Hotel, which began as the York, the first purpose-built hotel in Sidmouth – the ‘Royal’ prefix emanating from Edward VII’s presence there when he was still Prince of Wales.

Having received a welcome financial prize from the Westminster Gazette for his poem ‘The Voice’, Rupert headed back to Cambridge via London, staying at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn, with Eddie Marsh. By now Marsh was becoming an increasing influence in artistic circles, as well as in London’s social and political arena, into which he was beginning to introduce Rupert.

In the ancient manor of Portpoole, Old Gray’s Inn was bounded to the south by Holeburn Street, the Roman road which entered the City of London at New Gate, while to the east lay the town residence of Bishopric, later known as Ely Palace. To the north open fields stretched to Highgate, and to the west there was more country landscape, known as Jockey Fields. Raymond Buildings, on the west side of Gray’s Inn, were built in the early 1800s on part of the gardens formerly known as the black walks, the southerly end of the impressive six-storey terrace rising on Bacon’s Mount, where Francis Bacon had once constructed a 30-foot-high mound topped by a summerhouse. As others, including Brooke, would come to also, Bacon the philosopher loved the tranquillity of the walks; he wrote of them in his essay on gardens, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden and indeed it is the “Pursuit of Human Pleasure”.’ The buildings were named after Sir Robert Raymond, as they were originally to be erected in 1725 when he was Chief Justice, although fate decreed they were not to grace the site until, as it proclaims over the door of number five, 1825, when George IV was halfway through his ten-year reign.

Brooke had become the pin-up of Cambridge and Marsh, like others, was captivated by the Old Rugbeian’s looks and charisma. He kept a close watch on the young poet, inviting him to stay whenever he liked at 5 Raymond Buildings, which he did frequently as Rupert’s gravitational pull towards London became stronger; so adding to the already colourful history of the area. But however much the literary and social activities lured him to the capital, they would never surpass his love of the English countryside.

Three years later, in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, Brooke would write, ‘At Over they fling oaths at one’, but in May 1909 the locals may have had good reason to fling oaths, when Rupert and a crowd of Cambridge friends packed into Justin Brooke’s German Opel motor car – surely a terrifying sight in any sleepy hamlet at that time – and nearly crashed the car there on the way to Overcote.

For centuries, Over depended on the River Ouse and the Fens for its existence, in Norman times the river being full of fish and wild fowl plentiful in the area (although now the closest point to the River Ouse, which at one time flowed much nearer to the actual village, is at Overcote, 2 miles over the fields). Catches were dispatched daily to many cities, including London. In 1630 the Earl of Bedford appointed the Dutch engineer Vermuyden to drain the Fens, causing angry locals who feared for their livelihood to wreck the dykes as fast as they were being built. Despite this opposition, 21-mile-long canals, known as the Old and New Bedford Rivers, were successfully constructed, as well as red-back houses in the Dutch style being erected in Over. Woad, the blue dye with which the ancient Britons daubed themselves, was grown extensively around Over in the tenth century, which brought the cloth trade to the area. Architecture of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is still in evidence there.

On 2 May, the near-accident avoided, the Opel, with Justin Brooke at the wheel, Rupert, Geoffrey Keynes, Gwen and Margaret Darwin from Newnham Grange, and Ka Cox and Dorothy Lamb from Newnham College, rumbled down the track from Over to Overcote, where there was nothing more than a ferry and a small inn on the other side of the river. They laid out their breakfast at the edge of a meadow, where a crab apple was in bloom and a nightingale sang – an idyllic scene, despite only a watery sun and damp grass, inspiring Rupert to read aloud from Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Corinna’s Going a-Maying’:

Through such early-morning escapades, at Cambridge they swiftly earned themselves the nickname of ‘dew-dabblers’, running barefoot through the grass at dawn, and making wreaths of apple blossom and chains of cowslips and daisies. The ‘dew-dabbling’ was so successful that it was repeated later that month, the party this time including Rupert, Justin Brooke, Keynes, Trinity scholar Jerry Pinsent, Dudley Ward, Donald Robertson and three women thought to be the Darwins – Margaret, Frances and Gwen – although forty-three years on, Donald Robertson, who was photographed wrestling with Rupert at the gathering, and Dudley Ward could not agree on their identity when writing to Geoffrey Keynes in 1952. He thought the women could have included Dorothy Osmaston and Evelyn Radford, confessing ‘the kneeling man defeats us all’.