The Postcard
A postally unused Daily Mail 'War Pictures' postcard bearing an image of King George V talking to what the publisher describes as 'peasants' on the Western Front.
It must have been an interesting conversation, because the 'peasants' are highly unlikely to have spoken any English, and George V could not speak any foreign languages.
To stress his support for the British, the king made several visits to the Western Front. On one visit to France in 1915 he fell off his horse and broke his pelvis.
King George V
George Frederick Ernest Albert, who was born on the 3rd. June 1865, was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from the 6th. May 1910 until his death in 1936.
Born during the reign of his grandmother Queen Victoria, George was the second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra), and was third in the line of succession to the British throne behind his father and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor.
From 1877 through to 1892, George served in the Royal Navy, until the unexpected death of his elder brother in January 1892 put him directly in line for the throne.
George married his brother's fiancée, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, the following year, and they had six children.
Following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, George's father ascended the throne as Edward VII, and George was created Prince of Wales. He became king-emperor on his father's death in 1910.
As a result of the Great War (1914–1918), the empires of his first cousins Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany fell, while the British Empire expanded to its greatest effective extent.
A Change of Name to Windsor
On the 17th. July 1917, George became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, which he renamed from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as a result of anti-German public sentiment.
No wonder George dropped the Gotha name - on the 25th. May 1917, the Germans carried out a massed air raid on targets in south-east England, deploying 23 Gotha heavy bomber aircraft. 95 people were killed and 192 wounded, including both soldiers and civilians.
The first of the London daylight air raids was on the 13th. June 1917, with 14 Gotha bombers. The River Thames acted as a convenient navigation aid from the air. The ancient Egyptian Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment still bears shrapnel marks from a Gotha bomber raid,
Over 100 bombs were dropped, and 162 civilians were killed, including 18 infants at Upper North Street school in Poplar. The children's deaths particularly incensed the public.
The attack on the City of London was the first massed raid on London by aeroplanes, and there was no system of warnings in place. As the bombers began their return flight, any remaining bombs were dropped on the East End of London and the London Docks.
One 50 kilogram (110 lb) bomb landed on the Upper North Street School at 11:40 am. It passed through the girls' department on the top storey and the boys' on the middle floor, killing a twelve-year-old boy before landing in the infants' department on the bottom floor, where 64 small children were in two classrooms separated by a wooden partition.
Sixteen children were killed instantly, and two died later in hospital. Thirty children were seriously injured, including one girl who was found unconscious in the rubble three days later. Only two of the dead were over five years-old.
On the 31st. October 1917, 22 Gothas carried out an incendiary bombing raid over London using a total of 83 bombs. Although many of the incendiaries failed to activate, ten civilians were killed.
George V's Illness and Death
George suffered from smoking-related health problems throughout much of his later reign. Upon his death on the 20th. January 1936, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.
Edward abdicated in December of that year, and was succeeded by his younger brother Albert, who took the regal name George VI.
Ankylosing Spondylitis
Rather than meeting the King, the lady on the right should have been visiting a doctor - she has a developing case of ankylosing spondylitis - note the forward position of the head and neck, the marked curve to her back, and the tummy thrust forward in order to maintain equilibrium.
'The Next War'
'The Next War' is a prescient poem written by Robert Graves (1895–1985) which features in his 1918 book 'Fairies and Fusiliers':
"You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father’s hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?
Boys, from the first time you prod
And thrust with spears of curtain-rod,
From the first time you tear and slash
Your long-bows from the garden ash,
Or fit your shaft with a blue jay feather,
Binding the split tops together,
From that same hour by fate you’re bound
As champions of this stony ground,
Loyal and true in everything,
To serve your Army and your King,
Prepared to starve and sweat and die
Under some fierce foreign sky,
If only to keep safe those joys
That belong to British boys,
To keep young Prussians from the soft
Scented hay of father’s loft,
And stop young Slavs from cutting bows
And bendy spears from Welsh hedgerows.
Another War soon gets begun,
A dirtier, a more glorious one;
Then, boys, you’ll have to play, all in;
It’s the cruellest team will win.
So hold your nose against the stink
And never stop too long to think.
Wars don’t change except in name;
The next one must go just the same,
And new foul tricks unguessed before
Will win and justify this War.
Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage
Once more with pomp and greed and rage;
Courtly ministers will stop
At home and fight to the last drop;
By the million men will die
In some new horrible agony;
And children here will thrust and poke,
Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke,
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers."
Robert Graves
Captain Robert von Ranke Graves, who was born on the 24th. July 1895, was an English poet, historical novelist and critic.
His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.
Robert Graves produced more than 140 works in his lifetime. His poems, his translations and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life — including his role in the Great War — Good-Bye to All That (1929), and his speculative study of poetic inspiration The White Goddess have never been out of print.
Robert is also a renowned short story writer, with stories such as The Tenement still being popular today.
He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius; King Jesus; The Golden Fleece; and Count Belisarius.
He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style.
Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
Robert Graves - The Early Years
Robert Graves was born into a middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of south London. He was the eighth of ten children born to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), who was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe.
Robert's father was an Irish school inspector, Gaelic scholar and the author of the popular song "Father O'Flynn."
Robert's mother was his father's second wife, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke (1857–1951), the niece of the historian Leopold von Ranke.
At the age of seven, double pneumonia following measles almost took Graves's life, the first of three occasions when he was despaired of by his doctors as a result of afflictions of the lungs, the second being the result of a war wound, and the third when he contracted Spanish influenza in late 1918, immediately before demobilisation.
At school, Graves was enrolled as Robert von Ranke Graves, and in Germany his books are published under that name, but before and during the Great War the name caused him difficulties.
In August 1916 an officer who disliked Robert spread the rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who had assumed the name "Karl Graves". The problem resurfaced in a minor way in the Second World War, when a suspicious rural policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary.
Graves's eldest half-brother, Philip Perceval Graves, achieved success as a journalist, and his younger brother, Charles Patrick Graves, was a writer and journalist.
Robert Graves' Education
Graves received his early education at a series of six preparatory schools, including King's College School in Wimbledon, Penrallt in Wales, Hillbrow School in Rugby, Rokeby School in Wimbledon, and Copthorne in Sussex, from which last in 1909 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse.
There Robert began to write poetry, and took up boxing, in due course becoming school champion at both welter- and middleweight. He claimed that this was in response to persecution because of the German element in his name, his outspokenness, his scholarly and moral seriousness, and his poverty relative to the other boys.
Robert also sang in the choir, meeting there an aristocratic boy three years younger, G. H. "Peter" Johnstone, with whom he began an intense romantic friendship, the scandal of which led ultimately to an interview with the headmaster.
However, Graves himself called it "chaste and sentimental" and "proto-homosexual," and though he was clearly in love with Peter (disguised by the name "Dick" in Good-Bye to All That), he denied that their relationship was ever sexual. Robert was warned about Peter's proclivities by other contemporaries.
Among the masters, Robert's chief influence was George Mallory, who introduced him to contemporary literature and took him mountaineering in the holidays. In his final year at Charterhouse, he won a classical exhibition to St. John's College, Oxford, but did not take his place there until after the Great War.
Robert Graves and the Great War
At the outbreak of the Great War on the 4th. August 1914, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the 3rd. Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant on the 12th. August.
He received rapid promotion, being promoted to lieutenant on the 5th. May 1915 and to captain on the 26th. October 1915.
Robert published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet, and was one of the first to write realistic poems about the experience of frontline conflict.
In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom."
At the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and was officially reported as having died of wounds. However Robert gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.
One of Graves' friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in his regiment. They both convalesced at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for officers. Sassoon wrote to him in 1917.:
"How unlike you to crib my idea of
going to the Ladies' College at Oxford,"
At Somerville College, Graves met and fell in love with Marjorie, a nurse and professional pianist, but stopped writing to her once he learned that she was engaged. About his time at Somerville, he wrote:
"I enjoyed my stay at Somerville. The
sun shone, and the discipline was easy."
In 1917, Siegfried Sassoon rebelled against the conduct of the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves feared Sassoon could face a court martial, and intervened with the military authorities, persuading them that Sassoon was experiencing shell shock, and that they should treat him accordingly.
As a result, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh, where he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves was treated here as well. Graves also had shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then called, but he was never hospitalised for it:
"I thought of going back to France, but realized
the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear
of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a
sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was
enough to send me trembling.
And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling
now; the noise of a car back-firing would send
me flat on my face, or running for cover."
The friendship between Graves and Sassoon is documented in Graves' letters and biographies. The intensity of their early relationship is demonstrated in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which contains many poems celebrating their friendship.
Sassoon remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves became a friend of Wilfred Owen, who often used to send him poems from France.
In September 1917, Graves was seconded for duty with a garrison battalion. Graves's army career ended dramatically with an incident which could have led to a charge of desertion. He wrote:
"Having been posted to Limerick in late 1918,
I woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized
as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza.
I decided to make a run for it. I should at least
have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish,
hospital."
Arriving at Waterloo with a high fever but without the official papers that would secure his release from the army, he chanced to share a taxi with a demobilisation officer also returning from Ireland, who completed his papers for him with the necessary secret codes.
Robert Graves After the Great War
Immediately after the war, Graves with his wife, Nancy Nicholson had a growing family, but he was financially insecure and weakened physically and mentally:
"I was very thin, very nervous, and with about four
years' loss of sleep to make up, I was waiting until
I got well enough to go to Oxford on the Government
educational grant.
I knew that it would be years before I could face
anything but a quiet country life. My disabilities were
many: I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every
time I travelled by train, and to see more than two
new people in a single day prevented me from
sleeping.
I felt ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy, but had
sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to
be under anyone's orders for the rest of my life.
Somehow I must live by writing."
In October 1919, Robert took up his place at the University of Oxford, soon changing course to English Language and Literature, though managing to retain his Classics exhibition.
In consideration of his health, he was permitted to live a little outside Oxford, on Boars Hill, where the residents included Robert Bridges, John Masefield (his landlord), Edmund Blunden, Gilbert Murray and Robert Nichols. Later, the family moved to Worlds End Cottage on Collice Street, Islip, Oxfordshire.
Robert's most notable Oxford companion was T. E. Lawrence, then a Fellow of All Souls', with whom he discussed contemporary poetry and shared in the planning of elaborate pranks. By this time, he had become an atheist. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
While still an undergraduate Robert established a grocers shop on the outskirts of Oxford but the business soon failed. He also failed his BA degree, but was exceptionally permitted to take a Bachelor of Letters by dissertation instead, allowing him to pursue a teaching career.
In 1926, Robert took up a post as a professor of English Literature at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding, with whom he was having an affair. Graves later claimed that one of his pupils at the university was a young Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Robert returned to London briefly, where he separated from his wife under highly emotional circumstances (at one point Laura Riding attempted suicide) before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca.
There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). Both works had great influence on modern literary criticism.
Robert Graves' Literary Career
In 1927, Robert published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. The autobiographical Good-Bye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) proved a success, but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon.
In 1934, Robert published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources, he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935).
I, Claudius received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1934. Later, in the 1970's, the Claudius books were turned into the very popular television series I, Claudius, with Sir Derek Jacobi shown in both Britain and United States.
Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
Graves and Laura Riding left Majorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and in 1939 they moved to the United States, taking lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Their volatile relationship and eventual breakup was described by Robert's nephew Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927–1940: the Years with Laura, and T. S. Matthews's Jacks or Better (1977). It was also the basis for Miranda Seymour's novel The Summer of '39 (1998).
After returning to Britain, Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge, the wife of Alan Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week-End (1940) and The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943).
Graves and Beryl (they were not to marry until 1950) lived in Galmpton, Torbay until 1946, when they re-established a home with their three children, in Deià, Majorca. The house is now a museum.
The year 1946 also saw the publication of Robert's historical novel King Jesus. He published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948; it is a study of the nature of poetic inspiration, interpreted in terms of the classical and Celtic mythology he knew so well.
He turned to science fiction with Seven Days in New Crete (1949), and in 1953 he published The Nazarene Gospel Restored with Joshua Podro.
Robert also wrote Hercules, My Shipmate, published under that name in 1945 (but first published as The Golden Fleece in 1944).
In 1955, he published The Greek Myths, which retells a large body of Greek myths, each tale followed by extensive commentary drawn from the system of The White Goddess. His retellings are well respected; many of his unconventional interpretations and etymologies are dismissed by classicists.
Graves in turn dismissed the reactions of classical scholars, arguing that they are too specialised and prose-minded to interpret ancient poetic meaning, and that:
"The few independent thinkers are
the poets, who try to keep civilisation
alive."
He published a volume of short stories, ¡Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny, in 1956. In 1961, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.
In 1967, Robert Graves published, together with Omar Ali-Shah, a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The translation quickly became controversial; Graves was attacked for trying to break the spell of famed passages in Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation.
L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves, which Ali-Shah and his brother Idries Shah claimed had been in their family for 800 years, was a forgery. The translation was a critical disaster, and Graves' reputation suffered severely due to what the public perceived as his gullibility in falling for the Shah brothers' deception.
In 1968, Graves was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II. His private audience with the Queen was shown in the BBC documentary film Royal Family, which aired in 1969.
From the 1960's until his death, Robert Graves frequently exchanged letters with Spike Milligan. Many of their letters to each other are collected in the book Dear Robert, Dear Spike.
On the 11th. November 1985, Graves was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by friend and fellow Great War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads:
"My subject is War, and the pity
of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Of the 16 poets, Graves was the only one still living at the time of the commemoration ceremony, though he died less than a month later.
UK government documents released in 2012 indicate that Graves turned down a CBE in 1957.
In 2012, the Nobel Records were opened after 50 years, and it was revealed that Graves was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck (who was that year's recipient of the prize), Lawrence Durrell, Jean Anouilh and Karen Blixen.
Graves was rejected because, even though he had written several historical novels, he was still primarily seen as a poet, and committee member Henry Olsson was reluctant to award any Anglo-Saxon poet the prize before the death of Ezra Pound, believing that other writers did not match his talent.
In 2017, Seven Stories Press began its Robert Graves Project. republishing fourteen of Graves' out-of-print books.
UK government documents released in 2023 reveal that in 1967 Graves was considered for, but then passed over for, the post of Poet Laureate.
His religious belief has been examined by Patrick Grant, "Belief in anarchy: Robert Graves as mythographer," in Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief.
Robert Graves' Sexuality
Robert Graves was bisexual, having intense romantic relationships with both men and women, though the word he coined for it was "pseudo-homosexual." Graves noted:
"I was raised to be prudishly innocent,
as my mother had planned I should be."
In fact his mother, Amy, forbade speaking about sex, save in a "gruesome" context, and insisted That:
"All skin must be covered."
During his days in Penrallt, he had "innocent crushes" on boys; one in particular was a boy named Ronny:
"Ronny climbed trees, killed pigeons with
a catapult and broke all the school rules
while never seeming to get caught."
At Charterhouse, an all-boys school, it was common for boys to develop amorous but seldom erotic relationships, which the headmaster mostly ignored.
Graves described boxing with a friend, Raymond Rodakowski, as having a "a lot of sex feeling", and although Graves admitted to loving Raymond, he would dismiss it as "more comradely than amorous."
In his fourth year at Charterhouse, Graves met "Dick" (George "Peter" Harcourt Johnstone) with whom he would develop "an even stronger relationship".
Johnstone was an object of adoration in Graves's early poems. Graves's feelings for Johnstone were exploited by bullies, who led Graves to believe that Johnstone was seen kissing the choir-master.
Graves, jealous, demanded the choir-master's resignation. During the Great War, Johnstone remained a "solace" to Graves. Despite Graves's own "pure and innocent" view of Johnstone, Graves's cousin Gerald wrote in a letter that:
"Johnstone is not at all the innocent
fellow I took him for, but as bad as
anyone could be".
Johnstone remained a subject for Graves' poems despite this. Communication between them ended when Johnstone's mother found their letters and forbade further contact with Graves. Johnstone was later arrested for attempting to seduce a Canadian soldier, which removed Graves's denial about Johnstone's infidelity, causing Graves to collapse.
In 1917, Graves met Marjorie Machin, an auxiliary nurse from Kent. He admired her "direct manner and practical approach to life". However Graves did not pursue the relationship when he realised that Machin had a fiancé at the Front.
This began a period where Graves would begin to take interest in women with more masculine traits. Nancy Nicholson, his future wife, was an ardent feminist: she kept her hair short, wore trousers, and had "boyish directness and youth."
Her feminism never conflicted with Graves's own ideas of female superiority. Siegfried Sassoon, who felt as if Graves and he had a relationship of a fashion, felt betrayed by Graves's new relationship, and declined to go to the wedding. Graves apparently never loved Sassoon in the same fashion that Sassoon loved Graves.
Graves's and Nicholson's marriage was strained, with Graves living with "shell shock", and having an insatiable need for sex, which Nicholson did not reciprocate. Nancy forbade any mention of the war, which added to the conflict.
In 1926, he met Laura Riding, with whom he would run away in 1929 while still married to Nicholson. Prior to this, Graves, Riding and Nicholson attempted a triadic relationship called "The Trinity."
Despite the implications, Riding and Nicholson were most likely heterosexual. The triangle became the "Holy Circle" with the addition of Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs, who himself was still married to Irish artist Norah McGuinness. This relationship revolved around the worship and reverence of Laura Riding.
Graves and Phibbs both slept with Riding. When Phibbs attempted to leave the relationship, Graves was sent to track him down, even threatening to kill Phibbs if he did not return to the circle. When Phibbs resisted, Riding threw herself out of a window, with Graves following suit to reach her.
Graves' commitment to Riding was so strong that he entered, on her word, a period of enforced celibacy, which he did not enjoy.
By 1938, no longer entranced by Riding, Graves fell in love with the then-married Beryl Hodge. In 1950, after much dispute with Nicholson (whom he had not yet divorced), he married Beryl.
However despite having a loving marriage with Beryl, Graves took on a 17-year-old muse, Judith Bledsoe, in 1950. Although the relationship was described as "not overtly sexual", Graves later in 1952 attacked Judith's new fiancé, getting the police called on him in the process.
Robert later had three successive female muses, who came to dominate his poetry.
The Death and Legacy of Robert Graves
During the early 1970's, Graves began to experience increasingly severe memory loss. By his 80th. birthday in 1975, he had come to the end of his working life.
He lived for another decade, in an increasingly dependent condition, until he died from heart failure on the 7th. December 1985 at the age of 90 years.
He was laid to rest the next morning in the small churchyard on a hill at Deià, at the site of a shrine that had once been sacred to the White Goddess of Pelion.
His second wife, Beryl Graves, died on the 27th. October 2003, and her body was interred in the same grave.
Three of Robert's former houses have a blue plaque on them: in Wimbledon, Brixham, and Islip.
Graves had eight children. With his first wife, Nancy Nicholson (1899-1977), he had Jennie (who married journalist Alexander Clifford), David (who was killed in the Second World War), Catherine (who married nuclear scientist Clifford Dalton at Aldershot), and Sam.
With his second wife, Beryl Pritchard Hodge (1915–2003), he had William (author of the well-received memoir Wild Olives: Life on Majorca with Robert Graves), Lucia (a translator and author whose versions of novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón have been successful commercially), Juan (addressed in one of Robert Graves' most famous and critically praised poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"), and Tomás (a writer and musician).
