Welcome back to the deep dive. If you are joining
us today, you are exactly who we make this show
for. You are the learner. Exactly. You are someone
who is, you know, intensely curious about the
world, who loves those sudden aha moments. And
who wants the real story without drowning in
just an ocean of disorganized information. Right.
And our mission today is to do exactly that.
We are exploring a massive, incredibly detailed
compilation of historical research regarding
the life, the enduring myth, and the truly surprising
reality of the English poet Rupert Brooke. It
is a privilege to be doing this with you. We
are looking at a historical figure who has basically
been frozen in amber. Yeah, that's a great way
to put it. Whenever the cultural conversation
turns to the First World War, Rupert Brooke is
almost always presented as this flawless marble
statue of patriotism and tragic sacrifice. Right.
But as we unpack the historical documentation
today, we're going to see that the actual human
being walking around Edwardian England was wonderfully
and often painfully complex. To really understand
this, I want to paint a picture for you. Imagine
a man who genuinely seemed to have it all. Oh,
he really did. He was so charismatic and physically
striking that the legendary Irish poet W .B.
Yeats literally went on record describing him
as the handsomest young man in England. Which
is high praise from Yeats. Seriously. And he
penned the soldier. which stands as arguably
one of the most famous idealistic war sonnets
of the entire First World War. Absolutely. So
when you hear a resume like that, you naturally
assume this guy meets his end in some dramatic
blaze of battlefield glory. But, and here's the
hook, he didn't. No, he didn't. He died from
a mosquito bite on a French hospital ship. It
really is one of the great tragic historical
ironies of that era, and what's fascinating here
is how quickly A messy, vibrant, incredibly restless
life gets sanitized into a convenient two -dimensional
symbol for a grieving nation. Right, they just
smoothed out all the rough edges. Exactly. The
goal of our deep dive today is to completely
dismantle that golden boy myth. We need to look
at the deeply complex, surprisingly modern, and
undeniably flawed human being underneath the
famous poetry. Because when we strip away the
mythology and look at his actual life, it makes
him infinitely more interesting than the legend.
Far more interesting. Okay, let's unpack this.
To understand how he became this ultimate symbol
of English patriotism, we have to look at where
he came from. Mm. Did he have a typical upper
-class upbringing? Very much so, but with a twist
that put him right in the pressure cooker of
the British educational system from day one.
How so? Well, Rupert Chonabrook was born in 1887
into a fiercely academic family. His parents,
William and Ruth, actually met while working
at Fetz College in Edinburgh. OK. But because
that school didn't have accommodation for married
schoolmasters, his father had to resign. Wow,
that's harsh. It was the reality of the time.
So they moved to rugby in Warwickshire, where
his father eventually became a housemaster at
the famous rugby school. Ah, so Brooke didn't
just attend an elite school. No, he literally
grew up inside of one. That has to create a unique
kind of pressure. You aren't just a student.
You are the house master's son living in a glass
house. Exactly. You are constantly observed.
And there's a fascinating little detail in his
family tree, too. He was named after his maternal
great -grandfather, a distinguished doctor who's
actually descended from a regicide. Yes. His
ancestor, the man named Thomas Challener, actually
signed the death warrant for King Charles I.
So he has this undercurrent of rebellion deep
in his pedigree. That is a brilliant detail to
keep in mind, especially as we see how he navigates
the very rigid social structures of his time.
Right. He went to prep school locally, then attended
rugby school. He had an older brother, Dick.
and a younger brother, William Alford, who is
affectionately known as Podge. Podge, I love
that. But where the charisma factor really explodes
and he starts becoming this larger than life
figure is when he goes up to King's College,
Cambridge in October 1906 to study classics.
Because from the records, it sounds like he wasn't
just a student in Cambridge. He was a force of
nature. Oh, entirely. He was everywhere all at
once. He absolutely was. He didn't just join
clubs. He ran them. He was elected president
of the University Fabian Society. Which is crucial,
right? Very. It shows he was leaning into prominent
socialist political thought, not just traditional
conservative ideals. Right, he's pushing boundaries.
Then he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles,
which was an incredibly exclusive, highly intellectual
secret society. The elite of the elite. Exactly.
On top of that, he helped found the Marlowe Society
Drama Club and acted in the Cambridge Greek play.
He systematically placed himself at the absolute
center of Cambridge's cultural and intellectual
life. And it wasn't just resume building. People
were genuinely drawn to him. He seemed to cast
a spell over almost everyone he met. He really
did. There's a detail from the historical accounts
about George Mallory, the famous mountaineer
who would later disappear on Mount Everest. completely
falling under Brooke's spell. Yes, Mallory was
captivated by him. But I have to say, my absolute
favorite anecdote from this period completely
shatters this stuffy, buttoned -up image we have.
of a Dorian England. I think I know which one
you're going to mention. Virginia Woolf later
told the writer Vita Sackville West that she
and Brooke had gone skinny dipping together in
a moonlit pool during their Cambridge days. It
is a fantastic image, isn't it? It's amazing.
It completely undercuts the black and white rigid
historical footage we usually associate with
that era. Right. It makes them feel like real
people. Exactly. And if we connect this to the
bigger picture. Brooke represented the ultimate
Edwardian ideal. He embodied youth, intellect,
and physical beauty in this golden age just before
the devastation of the First World War changed
the world forever. The poster boy for an era.
Yes, he was the poster boy for a generation that
didn't yet know it was standing on the edge of
a cliff. But even within that so -called golden
age, things weren't perfect for him. In 1907,
his older brother Dick died of pneumonia at just
26 years old. A terrible tragedy. Brook actually
wanted to put his studies on hold to help his
parents grieve, which seems like a totally natural
response, but his parents absolutely insisted
he go back to university. That reaction from
his parents tells you so much about the emotional
repression of the time. Stiff upper lip and all
that. The expectation was to carry on, to maintain
the projectory. So he went back and he started
putting down serious roots in these legendary
literary circles. Earning a fellowship at King's
College in 1913. Yes, for a thesis on John Webster
and the Elizabethan drama. He became associated
with the Georgian poets, specifically the Dymac
poets in Gloucestershire. Rubbing shoulders with
literary heavyweights like Robert Frost and Edward
Thomas. Exactly. He even lived at the old Vicarage
in Grantchester, which inspired one of his best
-known poems. Looking at that timeline, it seems
like a continuous, effortless upward trajectory.
But when you look at his personal life, it is
a completely different story. Oh, completely.
The historical narrative often remembers him
as this stoic, traditional, patriotic soldier.
But his romantic life was incredibly fluid, passionate,
and painfully complicated. Yes, the private brook
is very different from the public monument. His
romantic life was deeply complex. Tell us about
that. We see intense romantic involvements with
fellow male pupils from his time at rugby including
Charles LaSalle's Denham Russell Smith and Michael
Sadler. Okay. He also had an older mentor named
st. John Lucas He was searching for connection
across a very wide spectrum and his relationships
with women were just as intense and layered He
was involved with an artist named Phyllis Gardner,
the actress Kathleen Nesbitt, and he was even
engaged at one point to Noelle Olivier. Who he
met at a progressive school when she was just
15. Right. Then there was Elizabeth van Rosselberg,
the daughter of a painter he met in Munich in
1911. Yes. The documentation notes that this
affair came the closest to being fully consummated
of any he'd had up to that point, and they may
have actually become lovers in a complete sense
a couple years later. When you look at all these
relationships collectively, it paints a picture
of a man who is incredibly restless. Yeah, always
searching. He had this massive gravitational
pull. So many people were deeply in love with
him. But being the center of everyone's emotional
universe takes a huge psychological toll. Wait,
I want to pause on that because on the surface,
being young. brilliant and desired by everyone
sounds incredibly glamorous. But wasn't that
exhausting for him? It was entirely exhausting,
and it eventually broke him. In 1912, that golden
boy facade completely shatters. Right. He suffered
a severe emotional crisis, essentially a nervous
breakdown. And the epicenter of this crisis was
the total collapse of his long -term relationship
with a woman named Catherine Laird Cox, who is
usually known as Caw Cox. Here's where it gets
really interesting. This wasn't just a bad breakup.
It spiraled into intense Paranoia, right? Exactly.
He became absolutely convinced that the writer,
Lytton Strachey, had actively, maliciously schemed
to destroy his relationship with Cockhawks. By
encouraging her to see another man, Henry Lamb.
Yes. Now, whether that was true or just magnified
by his own fragile mental state, the result was
devastating. It really was. This paranoia didn't
just end a romance. It caused a massive falling
out with his friends in the Bloomsbury group.
For those who might not know, The Bloomsbury
Group were basically the ultimate bohemian avant
-garde intellectuals of London. The center of
the cultural universe. Right, these were brilliant
people like Virginia Woolf who were rewriting
the rules of art, literature, and sexuality.
They were brilliant, but they were also living
completely in each other's pockets. I can imagine.
It was an intense, claustrophobic environment
where the emotional stakes were incredibly high.
Brooks' paranoia over the lit and strakey gossip
basically alienated him from some of the brightest
minds in London. He just burned his bridges.
He burned his bridges and suffered a total collapse.
So how do you recover from a social and emotional
collapse of that magnitude when you were one
of the most famous young men in England? By running
as far away as geographically possible. He went
to Germany initially for rehabilitation, but
that wasn't enough. He ended up taking a massive
global tour. Just left everything behind. He
traveled across the United States and Canada,
writing travel diaries to fund the trip, sending
dispatches back to the Westminster Gazette. Okay.
And then he took the long way home across the
Pacific, spending in the South Seas. You're telling
me this quintessential British intellectual basically
abandoned high society and ran away to the tropics.
He did. And it was exactly what he needed. The
contrast between the stuffy, gossip -filled drawing
rooms of London and the freedom of the South
Seas was profound. I bet. It's in Tahiti that
he seems to finally find some genuine peace.
Yeah. There is a fascinating detail that came
to light much later. Brooke may have fathered
a daughter with a Tahitian woman named Tata Mata.
Yes. Crucially, historical records suggest that
he enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship
with her. He literally had to travel to the other
side of the planet to find a connection he couldn't
sustain in elite English society. It's a poetic
in its own way. But history, as it always does,
catches up with him. He returns to England and
in August 1914, the First World War breaks out.
The world changes overnight. By this time, his
poetry had gained serious traction. He was being
championed by Edward Mush, a prominent patron
of the arts, who actually brought Brooke's work
to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was
a very powerful figure. And Churchill at the
time was the first Lord of the Admiralty. Yeah.
So shortly after turning 27, Brooke was commissioned
into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary
sub lieutenant. He was assigned to the Royal
Naval Division. This was an interesting setup.
It was essentially an infantry division made
up of Navy and Marine personnel who weren't needed
at sea. Right. He actually saw combat early on,
taking part in the Siege of Antwerp in October
1914. Wow. But let's be clear, it wasn't his
military strategy or his combat record that made
him a legend. It was his pen. Yes, the poetry.
In March 1915, the Times Literary Supplement
published two of his sonnets, The Dead and the
Soldier. Two of his most iconic works. And then
on Easter Sunday, April 4th, 1915, the soldier
was read aloud from the pulpit of St. Paul's
Cathedral in London. I want you to really think
about the psychological state of Britain at that
exact moment. Yeah, paint that picture for us.
The war is new. The horrifying reality of trench
warfare, the endless slaughter hasn't fully set
in yet. But the casualty lists are starting to
grow. Right. The nation is terrified. They desperately
needed to believe that this sacrifice was beautiful,
noble, and pure. They needed a reason for the
pain. And then, from the pulpit of the most famous
cathedral in the country, they hear Brooke's
words. This poetry perfectly captured that tragic,
romantic idealism. It gave the country a language
to process their fear and their grief. It's hard
to overstate the platform of St. Paul's Cathedral
on Easter Sunday. His words were echoing through
the absolute heart of the British Empire. Exactly.
But the reality of war is never as clean or romantic
as a sonnet. And this brings us to the staggering
irony of his death. He didn't die going over
the top of a trench, and he didn't go down with
a ship in a blaze of glory. No, he didn't. In
February 1915, he sailed with the British Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force toward the Gallipoli landings.
Which we know now would become one of the most
brutal campaigns of the war. Truly horrific.
But while stationed in Egypt, he developed severe
gastroenteritis, his immune system was compromised,
and then he got a simple mosquito bite on his
lip. A mosquito bite? Yeah. That is just difficult
to wrap your head around. Yeah. It developed
into streptococcal sepsis. Yes. He was moved
to a French hospital ship, the du Guaitron, which
was moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros.
The medical staff desperately tried to save him.
French surgeons actually performed two operations
trying to drain the abscess, but the blood poisoning
had spread too far. The description we have of
his final hours is incredibly atmospheric. It's
haunting. It doesn't sound anything like the
chaotic horror you picture when you think of
a First World War military hospital. His close
friend, William Dennis Brown, who was also a
musician, sat with him at the end. Brown recorded
that Brooke died at 4 .46 in the afternoon on
April 23, 1915. He was just 27 years old. So
young. Brown noted that the sun was shining all
around his cabin, a cool sea breeze was glowing
through the open door, and the air was fragrant
with the smell of sage and thyme blowing off
the mountains of the island. It is a profoundly
peaceful image. But the military machine doesn't
stop for poetry. what happens next is incredibly
urgent. Right. The expeditionary force had strict
orders to depart immediately for the Gallipoli
Peninsula. They literally could not wait. No
time to mourn. So they had to bury him that very
night at 11 p .m. in an olive grove on Skyros.
Another friend and fellow war poet, Patrick Shaw
Stewart, had to help conduct this hurried moonlit
funeral before they sailed off to battle. And
if you want a detail that perfectly encapsulates
the staggering, relentless loss of that entire
generation, just weeks later, Brooke's surviving
younger brother, William Alfred. Poch. Yes, Poch
fell in action on the Western Front in June 1915.
He had only been in France on active service
for 19 days. That is just staggering. Within
a matter of weeks, The Brook family loses two
sons. Unimaginable grief. It really underscores
that behind these marble monuments and massive
book sales, there were real families being absolutely
hollowed out by this conflict. It's a vital perspective
to hold on to because while his family was quietly
grieving this unimaginable double loss. Brooks'
public popularity absolutely exploded. Right.
It transitioned from literary fame into a full
-blown global phenomenon. His collection, 1914
and other poems, was published just a month after
he died in the Mediterranean. And the sales were
insane. To give you a sense of the sheer demand,
it ran to 11 impressions in that first year alone.
By June 1918, it was on its 24th impression.
The emotional impact his work had on the public
and even on the hardened military leadership.
is hard to fathom today. It really is. There's
an incredibly touching anecdote from the historical
account set in 1917. Field Marshal Edmund Allenby,
one of the most senior British commanders, received
news that his own son Michael had been killed
in action. This hardened general actually broke
down in tears in public while reciting a poem
by Rupert Brooke. It proves that Brooke's words
had literally become the emotional language for
a grieving nation. His influence crossed oceans
too. The Canadian fighter pilot John Gillespie
McGee Jr., who wrote the incredibly famous aviator
poem, High Flight, explicitly cited Brooke as
an inspiration. He even wrote a sonnet to Rupert
Brooke in 1938. He did. But I think it's important
we don't just print the legend here. Not everyone
was swept up in the Brooke mythology. That is
a very important point. As a critical counterbalance,
we have to look at how other writers reacted
to this monumentalizing of his work. Right. The
writer Lord Alfred Douglas, for example, issued
a scathing critique in 1919. Douglas wrote that
the massive enthusiasm over what he called Brooke's
puerile crudities meant that true poetry was
despised and dishonored and that same criticism
is dead or moribund. Wow. He didn't hold back.
Not at all. So there was absolutely a fierce
backlash against turning his poetry into sacred,
untouchable text. Despite the critics, the commemorations
went ahead and cemented his legacy in stone,
quite literally. Yes, they did. The original
wooden cross from his hurried grave on Skyrose
was eventually brought back to rugby by his mother.
Today, there are memorials to him everywhere.
The first stanza of his poem, The Dead, is inscribed
on the Royal Naval Division War Memorial in London.
Lines from his poetry are carved into the pediment
of the Cenotaph in Wellington, New Zealand. There's
a statue of him in his army uniform standing
in his front garden in Grantchester. And another
statue by Ivor Roberts Jones in his birth town
of Rugby. They physically carved him into the
foundation of British literary history. In 1985,
he was one of 16 First World War poets commemorated
on a slate monument in Poets Corner in Westminster
Abbey. Right. But there is a profound irony in
that specific memorial. The inscription they
chose to engrave on that monument in Poets Corner
actually comes from Wilfred Owen. Who wrote,
my subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry
is in the pity. Exactly. Wilfred Owen's poetry
was gritty, angry, and deeply disillusioned.
The exact opposite of Brooks' romantic idealism.
Placing them together is a subtle reminder of
the profound tragedy of all these lost, contrasting
voices. So what does this all mean? We started
this deep dive with the image of the handsomest
young man in England, the golden boy who rode
the soldier. Yes. But what we actually found
in the historical records was a man who went
skinny dipping in the moonlight with Virginia
Woolf, who navigated incredibly fluid and complicated
romances. Who suffered paranoid breakdowns over
literary gossip. Right, and who finally found
his most complete emotional connection on a beach
in Tahiti. He was transformed into a tragic symbol
of a lost generation, but his actual messy, vibrant
life makes him far more fascinating than any
marble statue ever could. The myth is powerful,
but the man is real. And this raises an important
question sparked by two incredibly evocative
details from a research that we haven't touched
on yet. Oh, lay it on us. The records mention
that right after Brooke died on that hospital
ship, his friend Frederick Septimus Kelly took
Brooks personal notebooks, which contained important
late poems for safekeeping to return them to
England. OK. It also mentions a recent 2023 painting
of Brooke by the artist Stephen Hopper, which
specifically features a blank sheet of paper
symbolized work unfulfilled. A blank sheet of
paper. That is haunting. I want you to ponder
that blank sheet of paper for a moment. If a
single infected mosquito bite hadn't ended his
life at 27, how would those unfulfilled late
poems in that notebook have evolved? Yeah. If
he had survived the horrors of the Gallipoli
campaign, would he have returned to England stripped
of his Edwardian idealism? Would he have started
writing the gritty, disillusioned, angry poetry
of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon? Or would
he have stubbed maintained his romanticism to
the bitter end. Exactly. It really makes you
wonder how much of our literary canon and the
very way we remember historical eras is dictated
by something as random and fragile as the biology
of a mosquito bite. That is an incredible thought
to leave on. The absolute fragility of history.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive. Keep questioning the myths behind the history,
keep looking for the messy realities, and we
will see you next time.