Siegfried Sassoon

He enjoyed playing cricket and played for the Matfield and Downside Abbey team until the late seventies.

He was romantically involved with men including, William Park, ‘Gabriel’ Atkin, actor Ivor Novello; Novello's former lover, Glen Byam Shaw; German aristocrat, Prince Philipp of Hesse; the writer Beverley Nichols; an effete aristocrat, the Hon. Stephen Tennant.

In 1933, he married Hester Gatty, with whom he had a child named George. He later died of stomach cancer and is interred at St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset. He is one among the sixteen ‘Great War poets’ honoured on a slate stone which was unveiled at the Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.

Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon, who was a descendant of a wealthy merchant family from Baghdad and Theresa, an Anglo-Catholic.

He was educated at The New Beacon Preparatory School, Sevenoaks, Kent and majored in history at Clare College, Cambridge from 1905-1907.

He dropped out of college and spent the next few years hunting, playing cricket, reading and writing poetry. Some of his poetry works were privately published at the time under a pen name.

Siegfried Sassoon expressed his opinions on the pre-World War I political scenario in his 1913 work, ‘The Daffodil Murderer’. It was a parody of John Masefield's, ‘The Everlasting Mercy’.

He joined the British Army just before the onset of World War I and joined the ‘Sussex Yeomanry’, a regiment of the British Army, on August 4, 1914. It also happened to be the day the United Kingdom declared war.

He injured his right arm in a riding accident, after which he spent the spring of 1915 recovering from his injury. During this time, his younger brother, Hamo was killed at war, which affected Sassoon mentally.

In May 1915, he was appointed as the second lieutenant in the ‘Royal Welsh Fusiliers’, an infantry regiment of the British Army. He was posted to the Western Front in France.

While he was on duty in the Western Front he discovered a German trench with 60 odd German soldiers in it; armed with only grenades he captured the trench. He was highly appreciated for his bravery.

‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’, published in 1928, is regarded as a classic in English literature and has been included in the academic syllabus. The novel won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

His series of semi-autobiographical books – ‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’, ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’ and ‘Sherston's Progress’ came to be known as the ‘Sherston trilogy’ and established Sassoon as a one of the most prolific writers of that era writer.