20 Facts About Vera Brittain

Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist.

Vera Brittain's best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.

Vera Brittain's father was a director of family-owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton.

Vera Brittain's mother was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the daughter of an impoverished musician, John Inglis Bervon.

When Brittain was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and 10 years later, in 1905, they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire.

Vera Brittain served initially at the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta and in France.

Vera Brittain met Winifred Holtby at Somerville, and a close friendship developed.

In 1925, Vera Brittain married George Catlin, a political scientist.

Vera Brittain's first published novel, The Dark Tide, created scandal as it caricatured dons at Oxford, especially at Somerville.

Vera Brittain based many of her novels on actual experiences and actual people.

Vera Brittain's newly found pacifism, increasingly Christian in inspiration, came to the fore during the Second World War, when she began the series of Letters to Peacelovers.

Vera Brittain was a practical pacifist in the sense that she helped the war effort by working as a fire warden and by travelling around the country raising funds for the Peace Pledge Union's food relief campaign.

Vera Brittain was vilified for speaking out against saturation bombing of German cities through her 1944 booklet, published as Seed of Chaos in Britain and as Massacre by Bombing in the United States.

Vera Brittain eventually became a member of the magazine's editorial board and during the 1950s and 1960s was "writing articles against apartheid and colonialism and in favour of nuclear disarmament".

Vera Brittain attended the engagement, but afterwards found she had fractured her left arm and broken the little finger of her right hand.

Vera Brittain died in Wimbledon on 29 March 1970, aged 76.

Some of Vera Brittain's ashes were buried in 1979 in the grave of her husband Sir George Catlin in the churchyard of St James the Great, at Old Milverton in Warwickshire.

Vera Brittain was portrayed by Cheryl Campbell in the 1979 BBC2 television adaptation of Testament of Youth.

Vera Brittain is the inspiration for Maud Gaunt, a secondary character in the novel In Memoriam by Alice Winn.

Vera Brittain's archive was sold in 1971 to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.