The Golden Youth
The poet WB Yeats described Rupert Brooke as ‘the handsomest young man in England’.
Rupert was born in on 3rd August 1887. His father was a House Master at Rugby School which Rupert eventually attended before going to Cambridge. It was there that Rupert’s glittering career began as men and women fell beneath his spell.
He was invited to join the Apostles, an influential secret dining society whose other members included many of the Bloomsbury Group including John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Such connections led to an occasion of ‘skinny dipping’ in the Cam with Virginia Woolf which she later recalled to her lover, Vita Sackville West.
In the summer of 1912, Brooke was living at the in Granchester near Cambridge when he wrote the memorable poem The Old Vicarage Granchester which closes with line "And is there honey still for tea?"
During that same summer his link with the Bloomsbury crowd was irreparably broken when Rupert accused Lytton Strachey of meddling in his relationship with Katherine Cox.
On the outbreak of war in 1914, he joined the Royal Navy and died of sepsis on 23rd April 1915 on his way to Gallipoli. He was 27 years old.
His poem The Soldier which was published posthumously brought him national attention.
"If I should die, think only this of me
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
For many it captured the prevailing patriotic mood.