47 Facts About Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume, fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the Sherston trilogy.

Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named Weirleigh in Matfield, Kent.

Siegfried Sassoon's father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon, son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family.

Siegfried Sassoon was the second of three sons, the others being Michael and Hamo.

Siegfried Sassoon was educated at the New Beacon School, Sevenoaks, Kent; at Marlborough College, Wiltshire; and at Clare College, Cambridge, where from 1905 to 1907 he read history.

Siegfried Sassoon left Cambridge without a degree and spent the years after 1907 hunting, playing cricket and writing verse, some of which he published privately.

Siegfried Sassoon's first published success, "The Daffodil Murderer", was a parody of John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy.

Siegfried Sassoon played for his village cricket team at a young age, and his brothers and three of his tutors were cricket enthusiasts.

Siegfried Sassoon played for his house at Marlborough, once taking 7 wickets for 18 runs, and during this time he contributed three poems to Cricket magazine.

Siegfried Sassoon later played for a Downside Abbey team called "The Ravens", continuing playing well into his seventies.

Siegfried Sassoon joined the Army just as the threat of a new European war was recognized, and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on 4 August 1914, the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany.

Siegfried Sassoon broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before leaving England, spending the spring of 1915 convalescing.

Siegfried Sassoon was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant on 29 May 1915.

Siegfried Sassoon soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic, dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda.

Siegfried Sassoon went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants.

Siegfried Sassoon's bravery was so inspiring that soldiers of his company said that they felt confident only when they were accompanied by him.

Siegfried Sassoon often went out on night raids and bombing patrols, and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander.

Robert Graves described Siegfried Sassoon as engaging in suicidal feats of bravery.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote: "To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for the first few days very much like a paradise".

Siegfried Sassoon wrote that it was a period of respite for him, and allowed him to indulge in his love of hunting.

Siegfried Sassoon stated that he did not do this as a symbolic rejection of militaristic values, but simply out of the need to perform some destructive act as catharsis.

Siegfried Sassoon became to Owen "Keats and Christ and Elijah", according to a surviving letter which demonstrates the depth of Owen's love and admiration for him.

Siegfried Sassoon was promoted to lieutenant, and, having spent some time in Palestine, eventually returned to France by 20 June 1918.

Siegfried Sassoon relinquished his commission on health grounds on 12 March 1919, but retained the rank of captain.

In 1919 Siegfried Sassoon took up a post as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald.

Siegfried Sassoon lived at 54 Tufton Street, Westminster, from 1919 to 1925; the house is no longer standing, but the location of his former home is marked by a memorial plaque.

Siegfried Sassoon later embarked on a lecture tour of the US, as well as travelling in Europe and throughout Britain.

Siegfried Sassoon acquired a car, a gift from the publisher Frankie Schuster, and became renowned among his friends for his lack of driving skill, but this did not prevent him making full use of the mobility it gave him.

Siegfried Sassoon had expressed his growing sense of identification with German soldiers in poems such as "Reconciliation", and after the war, he travelled extensively in Germany, visiting the country a number of times over the next decade.

In 1921 Siegfried Sassoon went to Rome, where he met the Kaiser's nephew, Prince Philipp of Hesse.

Siegfried Sassoon was a great admirer of the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan.

The memoir, whose mild-mannered central character is content to do little more than be an idle country gentleman, playing cricket, riding and hunting foxes, is often humorous, revealing a side of Siegfried Sassoon that had rarely been seen in his work during the war years.

Siegfried Sassoon followed it with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress.

At Craiglockhart, Siegfried Sassoon had met Wilfred Owen, another war poet.

In September 1931, Siegfried Sassoon rented Fitz House, Teffont Magna, Wiltshire, and began to live there.

The marriage led to the birth of a child, something Siegfried Sassoon had purportedly craved for a long time.

Siegfried Sassoon formed a close friendship with Vivien Hancock, then headmistress of Greenways School at Ashton Gifford House, Wiltshire, where his son George was a pupil.

Siegfried Sassoon was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1951 New Year Honours.

Siegfried Sassoon died from stomach cancer on 1 September 1967, one week before his 81st birthday.

Siegfried Sassoon is buried at St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset, not far from the grave of Father Ronald Knox, whom he so admired.

Siegfried Sassoon's CBE, MC and campaign medals are on display at the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum at Caernarfon Castle.

On 11 November 1985, Siegfried Sassoon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.

The year 2003 saw the publication of Memorial Tablet, an authorised audio CD of readings by Siegfried Sassoon recorded during the late 1950s.

Siegfried Sassoon was an undergraduate at the university, as well as being made an honorary fellow of Clare College; the collection is housed at the Cambridge University Library.

Several of Siegfried Sassoon's poems have been set to music, some during his life, by Cyril Rootham, who co-operated with the author.

In early 2019, it was announced in The Guardian that a student from the University of Warwick, whilst looking through Glen Byam Shaw's records at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, had serendipitously discovered a Siegfried Sassoon poem addressed to the former, which had not been published in its entirety.

Siegfried Sassoon served as inspiration for Alice Winn's novel In Memoriam, Specifically the character Sidney Ellwood.