Vera Brittain and Buxton

“The myth of female inferiority has always been rooted in the contention that men die for their country but women do not”, Vera Britain  was author of Testament Of Youth and mother to Baroness Shirley Williams former British socialist member of parliament.

Having delayed her university education after a year, to work as a nurse treating the wounded who had survived the trenches of the First World War, Brittain was bereaved of four of her closest friends, including her beloved brother and her fiance. Exhausted and emotional she vowed that if she were to survive the war, she would do everything in her power to immortalise the memory of those lost to her. .
Her family moved from Macclesfield to Buxton when she was aged eleven. Despite the comforts of a villa in The Park, an exclusive corner of a fashionable English spa, she detested life in the town despising it’s Edwardian formalities. Educated mostly at boarding school and Somerville College Oxford she returned in 1915 to serve at the Devonshire Royal Hospital which at the time offered severely wounded soldiers, hydropathic treatments.
After the war she returned to Oxford to read History where a friendship developed with the author Winifred Holtby, known for her novel South Riding. They remained friends until Holtby’s death in 1936, sharing a house together, both determined to become prominent on the London literary scene.

Testament Of Youth, Brittain’s second novel, was published in 1933 and was an immediate success selling out on the day of publication and remaining a best seller to this day. This was the story of her wartime experiences.

From the early 1920’s she became one of England’s leading pacifists, her convictions becoming one of the major driving forces in her life. During the Second World War Vera served as a fire warden. Surprisingly her name appeared
in the Black Book of two thousand people who were to be arrested following a German invasion.

Vera had married George Catlin in 1925, a political scientist and philosopher. Their son John was an artist and author. Their daughter the previously mentioned Shirley Williams was born in 1930.

On a badly lit London Street on her way to give a talk on pacifism Vera Brittain stumbled and fell breaking an arm and her little finger, she nevertheless addressed the audience that awaited her. Thus beginning a physical decline that led to her death in 1970 aged 76. In her will she requested that her ashes be scattered on the grave of her brother Edward in Italy, stating “For nearly fifty years much of my heart has been in that Italian village cemetary”.