Sassoon campaign launched by University Library

The acquisition of the archive through the £1.25 million fundraising campaign, combined with Cambridge University Library’s existing holdings, will create the most significant collection of Sassoon manuscripts anywhere in the world.

Led by Max Egremont, official biographer of the World War One poet, the campaign also has the backing of Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks, former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion and military historian Professor Richard Holmes.

Comprising seven boxes of material, the archive includes Sassoon’s journals, pocket notebooks compiled on the Western Front, poetry books and photographs, love-letters to his wife Hester, and letters sent to Sassoon by writers and other distinguished figures.

Sassoon’s draft copy of his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ is one of the treasures of the collection. Made by Sassoon in July 1917 as “an act of wilful defiance of military authority“ and sent to his commanding officer, it states his refusal to return to duty and his belief that the war, which he “entered as a war of defence and liberation“, had become “a war of aggression and conquest“ which was being “deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.“

The declaration, read in the House of Commons on July 30, caused a storm which only abated after fellow officer Robert Graves persuaded the authorities to send Sassoon to Craiglockhart Hospital for the treatment of shell-shock.

Egremont said: “As well as being one of the most famous of all British war poets, Sassoon was a distinguished autobiographical writer. For most of his life he kept copious journals.

“A successful fundraising campaign would create the most important gathering of Sassoon papers anywhere in the world. The alternatives – which might include the breaking up of the archive and its dispersal – could represent a disaster for the British archival heritage. I appeal to those who care about the preservation of this extraordinary archive to support the University Library’s campaign.”

Egremont has previously said of Sassoon’s war journals and autobiographical writings that they provide “a vision so haunting that twentieth-century British warfare still seems to be defined by futile offensives, exhausted men impaled upon wire or trapped in mud before an immovable enemy a mere few yards away.”

Cambridge University Library already holds several highly significant sets of Sassoon’s letters and manuscripts, and has for many years played a leading role in conserving the records of Sassoon’s life and works and making them accessible to readers.

Anne Jarvis, Cambridge University Librarian, is passionate about securing this collection and making it accessible to researchers.

She said: “The archive includes material of the greatest significance to twentieth-century British culture, and represents an exceptional source for English literary and military history.”

Scholars and historians may be particularly interested in Sassoon’s journals. Only a small number of them were edited by Rupert Hart-Davis – and in a popular, rather than a scholarly fashion. Important features, from notes on the mundanity of soldiering to entire poems, were omitted from the Hart-Davis edition.

Adding his backing to the Cambridge University Library campaign, Richard Holmes said: “It is hard to overemphasise Siegfried Sassoon's impact on the historiography of the First World War. Even those historians who, like myself, argue that it is unwise to attribute universality to poets' views of the war, can scarcely avoid putting Sassoon in the very first rank of the war's interpreters.
 

“He is a figure of towering importance, and there are moments when his eye is so penetrating that his accounts are primary sources of first-rank historical importance.
 

“But part of the historian's problem with Sassoon is assessing the degree to which the liveliness and unselfconsciousness of earlier material becomes transmuted as Sassoon worked on successive drafts to produce what another poet would have called 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' These papers seem to me to offer us a unique insight into the way Sassoon constructed his narrative, and to enable us to go back to those earlier flashes of blinding clarity which tell us so much about this terrible war. I warmly support Cambridge University Library's bid to secure this hugely important archive.”
 

Donations towards the campaign can be made by cheque, payable to ‘The University of Cambridge’ and sent to Cambridge University Library (Sassoon Appeal), West Road, Cambridge, England, CB3 9DR.