Testament of Youth: BBC Films announces a new dramatisation

[squirrel]

I saw it but like Sue I found the film very slow. A lot to pack in to nearly a couple of hours but this was nearly tedious. Not knowing that much about the nurses uniforms of the time, Sue's comments are welcomed as I thought that, for a change, they looked the part.

As for the men's uniforms, they looked the part and I could see no obvious howlers. Lieutenants uniforms showing cuff rank but with holes in the shoulder straps from having insignia on them previously seem to be par for the course for the wardrobe departments these days - coats had the same "extra" holes.

One thing that did niggle, why is it that every time the action moved to France, the outdoor scenes had constant rain and mud everywhere?

I may have missed something, but at Etaples, as I took it to be, distant gunfire was described as, "The Germans are getting nearer!".

[Ghazala]

Other than the film. After becoming emotional over the book Testament of Youth this book, with the reading of the four friends letters, brings home the horror of what Vera Brittain must of felt during that terrible war. Well worth a read.

[RobL]

Saw it a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed it. Very very well made. Only about 12 in total in the cinema but it was 2020 on a week night. Never read Testament of Youth so was quite the experience

[MichaelBully]

Really interested in hearing everyone's feedback . Doesn't look like the movie has become a box office smash .

Sue - good to hear that there was a reasonable level of accuracy in respect of the nurses' uniforms. Yes it was good that Hope Milroy ( 'Faith Moulson' ) wasn't portrayed in such an eccentric fashion as appears in the 1979 TV series.

Ghazala....I also rate the 'Four Friends' collection of letters very highly . It's intriguing to see how each of the main four male T of Y characters ,Edward Brittain, Geoffrey Thurlow, Roland Leighton, Victor Richardson, had quite distinct views about the War. I am not sure though if Roland Leighton and Geoffrey Thurlow had any contact. and Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson don't seem to have been that close .

Vera's was diary 'Chronicle of Youth' from 1913-1917 is well worth a read . Vera appears as less self concious and dare I day it, a bit more human, than in 'T of Y '.

Regards

[Ghazala]

I am not sure though if Roland Leighton and Geoffrey Thurlow had any contact.

Regards

Thurlow wrote to Edward Brittain from France on 23 January 1916 and said in respect of Roland Leighton... "Thank you very much for your long letter which came today and which I've read and reread: also for caring to tell me so much about him: although I never met him, I feel as tho' I know him well by what you have told me"

[Ghazala]

Really interested in hearing everyone's feedback . Doesn't look like the movie has become a box office smash .

Ghazala.... It's intriguing to see how each of the main four male T of Y characters ,Edward Brittain, Geoffrey Thurlow, Roland Leighton, Victor Richardson, had quite distinct views about the War.

Regards

Thank you Michael. My wife and I went to see the film at 7 pm on a Friday evening at the Empire cinema in Poole. Besides us there were just eight other people there. My wife who knows little of The Great War found it very sad and said afterwards that it showed the heartbreaking disillusionment of an idealistic public-school generation raised on ideas of patriotism and duty.

Eddie

[Ghazala]

Geoffrey Thurlow..

[Ghazala]

Grave of Edward Brittain..

[Ghazala]

Read an article somewhere last week referring to a Mark Bostridge investigation into the death of Edward Brittain...

In 1934, Edward’s Commanding Officer, Colonel Charles Hudson, a career soldier and a holder of the Victoria Cross, sought Vera out and told her what had really happened to her brother.

What he said in that private meeting remained a secret until only recently, when Bostridge dug out the story. It’s reasonable to assume that Hudson told Vera that Edward had either shot himself, or deliberately courted death rather than endure the shame and disgrace of a court martial. Bostridge was able to put the pieces together because he tracked down Hudson’s son in Devon, who showed him a private memoir, written by his father. The author discovered that the day before Edward’s death, Hudson had heard from the Provost Marshal in charge of the local military police that a letter from Edward to another officer had been opened by censors. The letter made clear not only that the two men were in a gay relationship, but that Edward had also been similarly involved with ordinary soldiers in his company. He had crossed the barriers outlawing homosexuality and – perhaps more damningly in consorting with men of lower rank.

Though forbidden by the Military Police to tell Edward that he was under investigation and would certainly face a court martial and public disgrace as well as probable imprisonment, Hudson decided to drop a broad hint of what awaited him to his subordinate officer. ‘I didn’t realise that letters written up here were censored at the base,’ he said. Edward made no reply, but went as ‘white as a sheet’ and quietly left the room. Within hours he was dead, at the age of 22.

‘What seems to have happened,’ says Bostridge, ‘is that, unable to face his family and the wider world with the truth of his sexuality in an age when being gay was considered criminal, he either shot himself, or more probably deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire. ‘He was found shot through the head after running ahead of his men as they went over the top.’

We may never know what truly happened to Edward, although his courage is beyond question. Vera never openly acknowledged what she had been told about her brother’s tragic fate, preferring to carry the secret to her grave. There is no hint in Testament Of Youth.

[Michelle Young]

Vera was able to write indirectly about what happened to Edward in her 1936 novel Honurable Estate. The heroines brother is killed at Gallipoli having chosen to get himself killed as he is in a homosexual relationship with a brother officer. She also used the book to write about her love for her American publisher, George Brett. The heroine falls in love with the soldier who brings her news of her brothers death, after consummating their relationship, the soldier is killed in action. The American is a mixture of Roland Leighton and Brett.

Michelle

[MichaelBully]

Hello Eddie, the questions surrounding Edward Brittain's death was discussed in a previous 'Testament of Youth' thread

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=180549&hl=%2Btestament+%2Byouth

I've copied my humble contribution to the discussion ( post #33) Hope it is off some interest !

" In respect of Edward Brittain : Vera had seen too much of war to accept the official version of Edward Brittain's death and felt that Colonel Charles Hudson, Edward's commanding officer, had not told her the truth when she met Colonel Hudson whilst he was recovering from wounds in a London hospital in 1918 . Vera insinuated that Colonel Hudson had taken the aclaim for Edward's possibly brave conduct at the Asagio Plateau on 15th June 1918, where he was killed in action.
On 9th July 1933 , they met again at Colonel Hudson's request following the publication of 'Testament of Youth', and this is when Vera seemed to have been informed about the possible charges against Edward.
The 1996 Paul Berry/Mark Bostridge biography contains some interesting material on this.
Mark Bostridge edited an anthology 'Lives For Sale-Biographers' Tales' -and contributed a piece called 'Ipplepen 269' about his research into Edward's death (published 2004).
Colonel Hudson's son Miles Hudson wrote a biography of his father 'Soldier, Poet, Rebel' (2007) which has a few pages on the matter.
As far as I know it is Vera's son John Caitlin in 'Family Quarter-Vera Brittain and her family' (1987) that first raised the possilibity of Edward Brittain being homosexual in print.

Personally I think that Mark Bostridge managed to uncover a great deal about the incident and credit is due to him for doing so.
Regards,
Michael Bully "

[Ghazala]

Thank you Michael. Very interesting. I find it all fascinating.

Eddie

[Sue Light]

A blog post here about the real Sister Hope Milroy:

Faith, Hope and Family

Sue

[Michelle Young]

Thank you Sue, fascinating.

Michelle

[Steven Broomfield]

My wife who knows little of The Great War found it very sad and said afterwards that it showed the heartbreaking disillusionment of an idealistic public-school generation raised on ideas of patriotism and duty.

Eddie

Would that not be more accurately phrased if the words "... of some members ..." were inserted immediately after the word "disillusionment"?

[MichaelBully]

Would that not be more accurately phrased if the words "... of some members ..." were inserted immediately after the word "disillusionment"?

Indeed, one criticism I have of 'Testament of Youth' is that at the time of publication, 1933, Vera Brittain was moving towards a pacifist stance, which she finally adopted in 1936 for the rest of her life.

One of the main individuals featured in the book, Victor Richardson , lost his eyesight, his mind, and finally his life on 9th June 1917 due to wounds incurred on 9th April 1917 at Arras. All subsequently published material suggested that Victor Richardson believed that he was fighting a just war, Whether it was ethical for Vera to turn Victor into some sort of icon for the 'Disenchantment' view of the Great War is open to question.

[MichaelBully]

Excellent material there Sue , what an incredible piece of research. Regards

A blog post here about the real Sister Hope Milroy:

Faith, Hope and Family

Sue

[Ghazala]

Would that not be more accurately phrased if the words "... of some members ..." were inserted immediately after the word "disillusionment"?

I passed your comment on to my wife Steven, who bristled slightly, and said they were words meant just for me and how dare I publish them on a forum. Thanks mate.... My attempts to get her to join this forum fail miserably.

[Steven Broomfield]

Don't blame me. I never come between a man and his wife. I know my Kipling.

[Sue Light]

Excellent material there Sue , what an incredible piece of research. Regards

That was just a very quick pulling together of sources over a couple of days and there's such a lot to find it could easily have been three times as long. A very interesting family, especially Geoffrey who had such a long career in the RAMC. Among other things he was the Commanding Officer of No.4 Casualty Clearing Station at the evacuation of Dunkirk which I hope to write more about at some time.

Sue

[Mark Hone]

Unfortunately, the 'Testament of Youth' film seems to have pretty much sunk without trace. I don't even recall seeing it listed at our local mega multiplex. My mother in law, who watched it at a small cinema in the Lake District, is the only person I know who has actually seen the film. For the record she enjoyed it. Hopes of capitalising on the interest generated by the centenary seem to have been unfounded. Are there any other Great War films in the offing?

[better ole]

Available to pre-order on amazon, via the 'Donations' link of course. £12.63 or there abouts.

[Ghazala]

Vera's mother Shirley Williams said that it was particularly hard for her father, the philosopher and political scientist George Catlin. Leighton emerges from the pages of Testament of Youth as a glamorous, heroic figure an idealistic public schoolboy who was captain of the officers training corps at Uppingham School. In truth, Leighton and Brittain had met for a total of only 17 days, often in the presence of a chaperone, and much of their courtship was conducted by letter.

My father was a lovely man and he adored my mother, says Williams. He once said to me: The hardest rival you can have is a ghost because your inclination is to idealise someone who died a long time ago.

Photograph... Vera Brittain and her husband, George Catlin

[Ghazala]

Unfortunately, the 'Testament of Youth' film seems to have pretty much sunk without trace.

Penultimate showing of the film at the Empire Cinema, Tower Park. Poole today at 1030 am. Thought I would go along for a second viewing. Just twelve of us there, mostly elderly ladies. I was struck by the strange war office decision to return a dead officers kit to his family. A very harrowing experience for the family. The folllowing is an extract of a lettter Vera wrote to her brother regarding Roland's kit when it was returned to his family....

"I arrived at a very opportune, though very awful, moment. All Roland's things had just been sent back from the front through Cox's; they had just opened them and they were all lying on the floor. I had no idea before of the after-results of an officer's death, or what the returned kit, of which so much has been written in the papers, really meant. It was terrible. Mrs Leighton and Clare were both crying as bitterly as on the day we heard of his death, and Mr Leighton with his usual instinct was taking all the things everybody else wanted and putting them where nobody could ever find them. (His doings always seem to me to supply the slight element of humour which makes tragedy so much more tragic.)

These were his clothes - the clothes in which he came home from the front last time. Everything was damp and worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you, nor Victor, nor anyone else who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies - dead that had been dead a long, long time. All the sepulchres and catacombs of Rome could not make me realise mortality and decay and corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes. I know now what he meant when he used to write of "this refuse-heap of a country" or "a trench that is nothing but a charnel-house".

And the wonder is, not that he temporally lost the extremest refinements of his personality as Mrs Leighton says he did, but that he ever kept any of it at all - let alone nearly the whole. He was more marvellous than even I ever dreamed. There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition - the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head - with the badge coated thickly with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it ...

We discovered that the bullet was an expanding one. The hole where it went in in front - well below where the belt would have been, just below the right-hand bottom pocket of the tunic - was almost microscopic, but at the back, almost exactly where his back bone would have been, there was quite a large rent. The under things he was wearing at the time have evidently had to be destroyed, but they sent back a khaki waistcoat or vest ... which was dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of khaki breeches also in the same state, which had been slit open at the top by someone in a great hurry - probably the doctor in haste to get at the wound, or perhaps even by one of the men. Even the tabs of his braces were blood-stained. He must have fallen on his back, as in every case the back of his clothes was much more stained and muddy than the front.

The charnel-house smell seemed to grow stronger and stronger till it pervaded the room and obliterated everything else. Finally Mrs Leighton said, "Robert, take those clothes away into the kitchen, and don't let me see them again; You must either burn or bury them. They smell of death; they are not Roland, they seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. I won't have any more to do with them."

And indeed one could never imagine those things the same as those in which he had lived and walked. One couldn't believe anyone alive had been in them at all. No, they were not him. After the clothes had gone we opened the window wide and felt better, but it was a long time before the smell and even the taste of them went away.

[Ghazala]

Colin Morgan of 'Merlin' fame is playing Victor Richardson, one of Vera's closest friends who died of wounds incurred at Arras. I regularly visit Victor's grave as live nearby, so will be particularly interested to see how he is portrayed.]

Two pictures of Victor Richardson. Vera wrote to Edward from Malta on 23 April 1917 "I am broken hearted indeed about Victor. His lovely eyes - I can't bear to think they will never any more look 'right into one's soul' as Mrs Leighton said they did.