Battle to keep Sassoon's papers in the UK

Published on Thursday 25 June 2009 23:04

A CAMPAIGN was launched yesterday to save the journals and papers of Siegfried Sassoon, the First World War I poet and writer sent to Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Hospital after he publicly denounced the horrors of the trenches.

Cambridge University wants to raise 1.25 million to buy and preserve Sassoon's papers, which range from love letters to his wife to mud-stained diaries from the front.

They include a draft copy of "A Soldier's Declaration", the anti-war letter Sassoon, a decorated hero known as "Mad Jack", wrote to The Times in July 1917. He was hospitalised in Edinburgh for "shell shock" to avoid an embarrassing court-martial. It was at Craiglockhart Hospital that he met and inspired the young Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon's biographer Lord Egremont called the papers – up for sale by Sassoon's descendants – an astonishingly frank account of his life and "the way a writer's mind works". They include unpublished poems and an account of his later gay affair.

Sassoon's journals break during his five-month stay at Craiglockhart from July to November 1917.

Experts say they are either missing, or were never written.

But when he was sent to Palestine in November 1917 he wrote: " "I intend to lead a life of light-hearted stupidity. I have done all I can to protest against the war and the way it is prolonged."