Roland Leighton

Roland Aubrey Leighton (27 March 1895 – 23 December 1915) was a British poet and soldier, immortalised in Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth.

Life and career

His parents, Robert Leighton and Marie Connor, were both writers.[1] He was brought up initially in St John's Wood, North London, and later at "Heather Cliff" a Victorian detached house sited above the beach at Lowestoft. Leighton was a prizewinning pupil at Uppingham School, where he became a close friend of Vera Brittain's brother, Edward and Victor Richardson. At Uppingham he was acting cadet officer in the Junior Division, Officers Training Corps.

Leaving Uppingham in July 1914, Leighton was awarded the Classical Postmastership at Merton College, Oxford, but when the War broke out he chose to seek a place in the Royal Navy, but was turned down due to short-sightedness. He subsequently procured a "general fitness" certificate from a local G.P. which did not make reference to his myopia and allowed him to seek a commission. He received his commission in the Norfolk Regiment on 21 October 1914,[2] and was promoted a lieutenant with the Worcestershire Regiment on 26 March 1915.[3]

Leighton served with the Worcestershire Regiment in France. He died of wounds on 23 December 1915 at the age of twenty (although his gravestone incorrectly states that he was nineteen). He had been shot by a sniper, and sustained a catastrophic abdominal and spinal injury, while inspecting wire in front of a trench at Hébuterne, France. He is buried in the military cemetery at Louvencourt, near Doullens.[4] Brittain's biographer Mark Bostridge has reported that Leighton's grave is often covered by violets in tribute to a poem he wrote for Brittain[5]

"Violets from Plug Street wood,
Sweet, I send you from oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head:
It is strange they should be blue.)
Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Think what they have meant to me—
Life and hope and love and you.
(And you did not see them grow,
where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so)
Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land,
These I send in memory,
Knowing you will understand".[6]

He converted to Roman Catholicism while at the Front in 1915, a course he had been considering before the war.

Although Leighton never took up his place at Merton College, his name is on the war memorial there, in addition to his entry on the Uppingham School war memorial within the school chapel.

Vera Brittain, who had accepted his proposal of marriage four months before his death, was to immortalise him in her writing at the time, and later in Testament of Youth. Many of Leighton's letters are included in Letters from a Lost Generation, a compilation of her wartime letters, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, published in 1998. His mother anonymously published a memoir of him called Boy of My Heart in 1916. Brittain's Chronicle of Youth, which contains her diaries 1913–1917, includes entries about Roland Leighton and their relationship and excerpts from his letters from the battlefield, and his poetry.

In the 1979 TV adaptation of Testament of Youth Roland was played by Peter Woodward. The role was taken by Rupert Graves in the 1998 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Letters from a Lost Generation and by Christian Brassington in BBC 1's documentary Vera Brittain: A Woman in Love and War in 2008. In the 2014 feature film of Testament of Youth Leighton was played by Kit Harington, alongside Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain.

Roland's younger sister was Clare Leighton, who went on to become a talented woodcut artist and emigrated to the United States. She wrote a biography of her mother, Tempestuous Petticoat.

References

  1. ↑ "The Harvest of Sin". Women in the Literary Marketplace 1800–1900. Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. 2002. Retrieved 17 October 2015.
  2. ↑ The London Gazette: no. 28945. p. 8404. 20 October 1914.
  3. ↑ The London Gazette: no. 29112. p. 2963. 23 March 1915.
  4. ↑ CWGC entry
  5. ↑ Mark Bostridge (May 21, 2012). "Vera’s Testament is young again". The Daily Telegraph.
  6. ↑ "Original manuscript for Violets - April, 1915".

Further reading

External links

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