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Discovering Rupert Brooke Grantchester Dymock

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Discovering Rupert Brooke Grantchester Dymock Just after their 21st wedding anniversary, for the first time since Christmas, David Maxwell Fyfe managed to get back to London to be with his wife and their family for a weekend over Easter. It was an extremely welcome reunion, as it was two months since they had been together, when Sylvia visited him in Nuremberg, and the time spent apart was growing more difficult for them both as there was still no clear end in sight for the trial. David Maxwell Fyfe 11th April 1946 Keitel is finished and Kaltenbrunner has ‘taken the stand’ I have nothing to do with him and am hoping violently that the Americans will do a good job. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the highest-ranking member of the SS to face trial at Nuremberg. As Chief of the Main Security Office from 1943 - 45 he answered to Heinrich Himmler, overseeing a period in which persecution of Jews intensified. He is considered a major perpetrator of the Holocaust during the final years of the war. David Maxwell Fyfe 11th April 1946 I cannot realise that I am going to get home a week from today. It will be absolutely marvellous. Sylvia Maxwell Fyfe 14th April 1946 If it is any pleasure to you to know this is the first year out of 21 that I have not enjoyed. It ought to make you rather conceited if that were possible. Anyway I shall adore my Easter - and all things come to an end - even Nuremberg trials I suppose though I confess I sometimes doubt it. There was very little let up from the relentless strain of the trial, now in its’ sixth month, or genuine relaxation in the company of his equally tired work colleagues. After a short Easter break at home in London mid-month, the letters eagerly anticipate a reciprocal visit from Sylvia as soon as possible. David Maxwell Fyfe 24th April 1946 Everyone here is most anxious to know how you are and when you are coming here again. They are delighted to know that your second visit will materialise. I wish it was tomorrow. David Maxwell Fyfe 24th April 1946 So I must just try and thank you on paper for my wonderful week-end. It was magnificent and I enjoyed every minute of it except when I thought of going. I do not think that we could have improved on any part of it each thing we did was perfect in its turn. Albion Words & Music by Sue Casson I dreamed I saw the Albion Of ancient history A sceptred isle A precious stone Set in a silver sea Possessed by giants And knights so bold A mythic treasury So fair this golden land So free So natural is the fairness of this land That human hand should strive to be so fair To rich as well as poor For that is natural law Impartial justice free as air No man or island of itself Entire and solitary Exists alone But is one part Of one great unity For each and all Must live in peace That Albion may be A green and pleasant land And free Transcript of ‘A Political Adventure’ If Maxwell Fyfe’s romantic imagination was fired as a boy by the majesty of Edinburgh Castle, the tales of Walter Scott and the sweeping vistas from Blackford Hill, he owes his teachers at George Watson’s School the ability to put these sensibilities into words, or pluck a literary phrase or fact to support an argument. In his autobiography, as well as HJ Findlay, his history teacher WR Cooper earns a mention for giving him a living sense of history, on which he was apparently complimented by von Papen at Nuremberg, whilst the natural law that was the basis of his personal credo is widely expressed in the Greek classics he read at Oxford. “Never such innocence, Never before or since” Phillip Larkin, MCMXIV (1914) I blame Philip Larkin, and the weather. August 1914 was in the words of the meteorological office, ‘warm, dry and sunny.’ The first eight days were changeable, and war was declared on the 3rd. The latter three weeks was real summer with temperatures hitting 86 degrees. So the pictures of those standing in line to enlist are bathed in summer sun. And in those pictures, evoked by Larkin in his poem MCMXIV (1914), the poet was able to see innocence – an innocence shattered by the forthcoming war. Of course there was no innocence. Some enlisted for the hope of heroism in a romantic war. Many more volunteered to avoid unemployment, the trap of the Poor Law, at the In the eyes of the poet Rupert Brooke there was a insistence of their employers, or to escape their moral turpitude. His war sonnets, so often written present life. off as misplaced patriotic buffoonery, are, like his other poems, about transformation: In a society where wealth was concentrated in the hands of very few, where the initial stock ‘from a world grown old and cold and weary, of industrial housing was already in decay, and Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, where agricultural practices had been And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, revolutionised at the expense of those who had And all the little emptiness of love! lived on the land, there was no innocence. He was seeking transformation, and found it in the purpose and comradeship of war. He did not live to see the defensive weaponry, that nullified the impact of cavalry, create an infantry Armageddon. This war was part of the turpitude, for there was no foresight to prevent the carnage. During these years of death, man was in the thrall of his weapons, and weapons grew and grew in their thunder. Amongst those who have championed fundamental freedoms and protected human rights there have been many who have perceived the need for transformation. There is something about Brooke. TDMFB DISCOVERING RUPERT BROOKE Rupert Brooke was just 27 when he died on Skyros in April 1915 on the way to fight in Gallipoli. He was already a published poet, known for his good looks and charm, and counted several members of The Bloomsbury Group amongst his circle of friends. The 1914 sonnets were immediately famous ; The Soldier was read aloud by the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915. Since his death, Brooke’s war poetry has been put aside as ‘idealistic’ against the ‘realism’ of the futility of war in the trenches expressed in the poems of Wilfred Owen. But dying before he reached the battlefront enabled him to voice the ideals of his generations on the outbreak of war. His most famous war sonnet, The Soldier, was originally called The Recruit, so it makes sense that his poetic legacy lies not in documenting the mess and pain of war, but why he believed the war was fought. After Rupert Brooke studied at Kings College, Cambridge, he lodged in Grantchester from 1909 - 12, first at The Orchard and later, at The Old Vicarage. GRANTCHESTER His famous poem, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, celebrates the natural beauty of his adopted village. In turn, it adopted him, engraving his name on the war memorial and in the Book of Remembrance in the church. would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester! — Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. The Old Vicarage, Grantchester by DYMOCK Rupert Brooke In the spring of the centenary of Rupert Brooke’s death, English Cabaret performed settings of his poems at the annual poetry day of the Friends of Dymock Poets, which promotes interest in him, as one of six writers who gathered there shortly before World War I. Several of his poems were first published in their journal, New Numbers, including his sonnet series, 1914. UNDER AN ENGLISH HEAVEN Dreams of Peace & Freedom began life as a soundtrack to Under an English Heaven - a film about the life of David Maxwell Fyfe that Tom Blackmore made for the Kilmuir Papers website. It took its’ name from the final line of Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet The Soldier, which Fyfe had quoted in his closing at Nuremberg, and comprised five songs – musical settings of poetry that inspired him. Of these, four were settings of the poetry of Rupert Brooke, The Soldier acting as a springboard to our inspiration. At this time, our daughter Lily was a chorister in the Southwark Cathedral Girls Choir, and Tom and I both loved the ethereal effect created in the blending of two strands of young voices. Inspired by that Southwark ‘sound’, I wrote in a style to evoke ‘English music’ of the early 20th century, in 3 rather than 2 parts to enrich the harmony. At the same time, I experimented with a setting of Brooke’s War Sonnet III - The Dead which ends with the word ‘heritage’, echoed by Fyfe in the same speech when he talks of rights for all as ‘the inalienable heritage of mankind.’ It opens with the lines - ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.’ Brooke was writing about the First World War, but these lines take on a further resonance in a story telling how human rights evolved into law after the Second. The sound of the bugles blowing over the battlefield dead echo on in a musical herald to an unprecendented trial seeking to impose meaning on the waste of life; bringing gold out of the base metal and carnage of WWII – restoring Honour and Order to Chaos.
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