Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, the second of three sons of Alfred Ezra Sassoon and Theresa Georgina Thornycroft, was born on 8th September 1886 at Weirleigh, Matfield, near Brenchley in Kent. The Sassoons were a wealthy Baghdadi and Indian Jewish merchant family and the Thornycrofts were a notable English Catholic family of sculptors, artists and engineers. Alfred Sasson was disinherited for marrying outside the Jewish faith and after six years of marriage, when Siegfried was four, the couple separated. Five years later in 1895 Alfred Sassoon died of tuberculosis.
Siegfried was educated at Marlborough College and then Clare College, Cambridge, but in 1907 left university without a degree. For the next seven years he hunted and played cricket in Kent, and began to develop his talent for poetry, some of which he published privately.
WWI was to change Siegfried's life. After a period with the Sussex Yeomanry, Siegfried joined the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant on 29th May 1915. As his battalion was preparing to leave for France, Siegfried was hit hard by the death of his younger brother Hamo on 1st November 1915 from wounds received in the Gallipoli campaign. Siegfried's bravery and leadership on the Western Front was exceptional. He was nicknamed "Mad Jack" for his exploits and was awarded the Military Cross on 27th July 1916 for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.. In April 1917 he was wounded and during his convalescence in Oxford met with pacifist friends including Bertrand Russell. He was inspired to write Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration which he sent to his commanding officer and to a sympathetic M.P. who read it out in the House of Commons. It was also published in The London Times. Being a serving officer Siegfried could have faced a court martial for this defiant statement but instead the Under-Secretary of State for War sent Siegfried to Craiglockart War Hospital in Edinburgh to be treated for "shell shock" where he met and strongly influenced the war poet Wilfred Owen. Siegfried was treated by the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers who became a life-long friend. In 1918 Siegfried returned to active service in Palestine and then France where he was wounded again on 13th July and returned to Britain having been promoted to acting captain.
Siegfried's reputation as a war poet was secured with the publication of The Old Huntsman and Other Poems in 1917 and Counter Attack in 1919 - containing over 100 realistic and compassionate poems about the war. Throughout the 1920s he published numerous collections of poems, dabbled in politics and toured extensively in the U.S.A. and Europe. In 1928 he published his first novel - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man - a fictionalised autobiography about his early years in Kent where he figures as the narrator George Sherston. The novel was an immediate success and won the Hawthornden and James Tait Black memorial prizes. Two more fictionalised autobiographies followed Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). Later in life Siegfried would write his genuine autobiography in three volumes - The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey (1945) and then in 1948 published a biography of George Meredith. Throughout this period until the 1960s he continued writing and publishing his poetry. In the 1951 New Years Honours he was made Companion of the British Empire.
Siegfried's personal life after the war is marked by his search for a life-time companion. He also began to express his homosexuality more openly as he conducted a series of unsuccessful affairs with a number of his artistic and aristocratic friends. In 1931 Siegfried moved to Wiltshire where he was to stay for the rest of his life and in 1933, to the surprise of many, he married Hester Gatty who was twenty years his junior. They bore one child George Thornycroft Sassoon (1936-2006) who became a scientist, linguist and author. The marriage broke down in 1945. In 1957 Siegfried converted to Roman Catholicism and he paid regular visits thereafter to the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey who printed some of his later work.
Seigfried Sassoon died on 1st September 1967 one week before his 81st birthday of stomach cancer. He is buried at St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset. On 11th November 1985, Siegfried was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription, written by Wilfred Owen, reads:
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Headstone
†
SIEGFRIED
LORAINE
SASSOON
1886-1967
R.I.P.
Counter-Attack © Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon | ||
We'd gained our first objective hours before While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke. Things seemed all right at first. We held their line With bombers posted, Lewis guns well-placed, And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench. The place was rotten with dead; green, clumsy legs, High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps; And trunks, face-downward in the sucking mud, Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; And naked sodden buttocks, - mats of hair, - Bulged, clotted heads, slept in the plastering slime. And then the rain began, - the jolly old rain! A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, Staring across the morning blear with fog; He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; And then, of course, they started with five-nines Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. Mute in the clamour of shells, he watched them burst, Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape, loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. An officer came blundering down the trench: 'Stand-to and man the fire-step!' On he went, Gasping and bawling, 'Fire-step … counter-attack!' Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right Down the old sap; machine-guns on the left; And stumbling figures looming out in front. 'O Christ, they're coming at us!' … Bullets spat, And he remembered his rifle … rapid fire … And started blazing wildly … then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle; none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans … Down and down and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed. |
The Weald of Youth © Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon |
Commences:Late one afternoon, at the end of May, in the year 1909, I was driving myself home from Tunbridge Wells in our new dog-cart, which was a very comfortable one, two-wheeled, rubber-tyred, nicely varnished, and much the same colour as brown sherry. Under the seat was my cricket-bag. And beside me, below my straw hat, which I had placed over it for safety's sake, was this week's number of The Academy. To call it this week's number was an understatement of its significance; for it contained a sonnet to which my initials were reticently appended, and I was feeling appropriately elated. My sonnet wasn't an exhilarating one, for it was about the poet Villon when he was rather more down and out than usual. But there it was, for everybody to read; and when I got home one I would read it again myself, with due appreciation of its finely-cadenced ending. and ends: The years of my youth were going down for ever in the weltering western gold, and the future would take me far from that sunset-embered horizon. Beyond the night was my new beginning. The Weald had been the world of my youngness, and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do what I could to defend it. And after all, dying for one's native land was believed to be the most glorious thing one could possibly do! |
Whilst recovering from wounds received on the front, Siegfried, who had witnessed the death and suffering of many of his friends and colleagues, incuding the death of his close friend David Thomas, decided that he should make some sort of protest and in 1917 he wrote his Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration. He sent it to his commanding officer, to his friends and to Hastings Lees Smith, M.P. who read it out in the House of Commons. It was published in The London Times the following day.I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellows soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attained by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which has been practised upon them; also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise. |
Sheikh Ben Saleh Sassoon | m: c 1785 | Amam Gabbay | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 1750 Baghdad, Iraq d: 1830 Bushire, Iran | b: 1746 d: 1821 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Benjamin Yamen | Joseph | Reuben | David | Simon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 1785 to 1790 Baghdad, Iraq | b: 1785 to 1790 Baghdad, Iraq | b: 1791 Baghdad, Iraq d: 1802 | b: Oct 1792 Baghdad, Iraq d: 7th Nov 1864 Pune, Maharashtra, India | b: 1795 Baghdad, Iraq | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2nd marriage | David Sassoon | m: 1828 | Fahra Hayim | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: Oct 1792 Baghdad, Iraq d: 7th Nov 1864 Pune, Maharashtra, India | b: 1814 Baghdad, Iraq d: 1886 Calcutta, India | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sassoon David | Arthur Abraham David | Aaron David | Kate | Rebecca | Simha | Frederick David | Mozelle | b: 1832 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 23rd Jun 1867 Langham Hotel, Portland Place, London | b: 1840 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 13th Mar 1912 Ascott, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire | b: 1841 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 5th May 1907 35 First Avenue, Hove, Sussex | b: 1844 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 1917 Steyning, Sussex | b: 1847 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 1918 | b: 1850 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 1857 | b: 1853 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 14th May 1917 17 Koghtsbridge, London | b: 1855 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 26th May 1952 Hove, Sussex | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
David Reuben | Solomon David | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 1835 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 7th Mar 1905 Sussex | b: 1841 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 1894 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sassoon David Sassoon | m: 1850 Bombay, Matraharash, India | Fahra Reuben | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 1832 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 23rd Jun 1867 Langham Hotel, Portland Place, London | b: 1836 d: 7th Mar 1919 37 Adelaide Crescent, Brighton, Sussex | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Captain Joseph | Alfred Ezra | Frederick Meyer | Rachel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 1856 Bombay, Matraharash, India d: 2nd Jan 1918 London | b: Jul to Sep 1861 London d: 18th Apr 1895 Grand Parade, Eastbourne, Sussex | b: 15th Jul 1862 London d: 3rd Oct 1889 Ashley Park, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey | b: 1864 ch: 3rd Aug 1887 Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea, Kensington, London | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alfred Ezra Sassoon financier and sculptor | m: Jan 1884 London | Theresa Thornycroft | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: Jul to Sep 1861 London d: 18th Apr 1895 Grand Parade, Eastbourne, Sussex | b: 1853 St. Pancras, London d: 1947 Tonbridge, Kent | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Michael Thornycroft | Siegfried Loraine | 2nd Lieut. Hamo Watts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 14th Oct 1884 Tonbridge, Kent d: Dec 1969 Tonbridge, Kent | b: 8th Sep 1886 Weirleigh, Matfield, Kent d: 1st Sep 1967 Heytesbury, Wiltshire bur: After 1st Sep 1967 St Andrew's churchyard, Mells, Somerset | b: Oct to Dec 1887 Weirleigh, Matfield, Kent d: 1st Nov 1915 Sulva Bay, Dardanelles, Turkey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon C.B.E., M.C., Poet and Novelist | m: Dec 1933 Christchurch, Hampshire | Hester Gatty | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 8th Sep 1886 Weirleigh, Matfield, Kent d: 1st Sep 1967 Heytesbury, Wiltshire bur: After 1st Sep 1967 St Andrew's churchyard, Mells, Somerset | b: Apr to Jun 1906 d: 1973 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
George Thornycroft | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
b: 30th Oct 1936 London d: 8th Mar 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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