Vera in Buxton

BUXTON IN ITS EDWARDIAN HEYDAY

Buxton Gardens promenade, early 1900s

Why did Arthur and Edith Brittain decide in 1905 to leave the gracious home Edith had created in Macclesfield to move to Buxton, just ten miles away?

Better schools were only one factor in Arthur and Edith Brittain’s social aspirations. While Buxton had similar attractions to genteel Harrogate and upper-class Bath, its unique social atmosphere came from 200 years as an ‘estate resort’ created and controlled by the powerful Devonshire dynasty.  Until the late nineteenth century, the Devonshires owned virtually all of Buxton, surrounding villages and huge swathes of the Peak District, property in London and vast estates in Ireland and other parts of England. 

In partnership with the Buxton Improvement Company (created in 1869), the Devonshire Estate transformed Buxton from a small sedate, upper-class Georgian resort centred around the stunning Crescent, into a booming spa town.  By 1905, it had an annual town guide, advertisements in major newspapers and railway stations, exhibitions of new developments at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and publicity in the Illustrated London News.

According to the Buxton Advertiser, 1905, the year of the Brittains’ move to Buxton, was its most successful yet. With a resident population of 12,000 and 4,000 staying guests and day-trippers a week during the high season, there had been a huge influx of prosperous families living in Buxton or renting a second home there.  With wealth from trade, manufacturing, and business, most were from the north-west and midlands.  Acclaimed architects competed for commissions to design grand houses, many of which were rented out to middle-class families like the Brittains.  

Buxton’s two weekly newspapers promoted the town’s attractions with great enthusiasm. Long lists of weekly visitors accompanied London society gossip, the royal family’s schedule, the results of Wimbledon and other major sporting events, national and local news. Lively editorials opined on national and local topics, alongside glowing reviews of society balls, musicals, the town’s many sporting events, concerts by one of the town’s four orchestras, and daily music programmes in the Gardens.

In the years before the First World War, Buxton offered families like the Brittains a higher level of genteel exclusivity, in more salubrious surroundings, with grander homes and public amenities than other towns. It enabled the rising middle classes to display the fruits of their labours and signal their intentions for a better life.  Fashionable enough for a royal visit in 1905, it was a resort created by dukes to see and be seen in, from where residents could see a show in London and catch the last train home, where operas and plays with top performers and shops with the latest Paris fashions in walking distance from grand residences, hotels and lodging houses. 

Taking the waters at the Pump Room, 1912

Opera House, early 1900s

With no welfare state, national health service or local councils to provide services, wealthy residents were expected to raise money for hospitals, do charity work and serve on committees. Middle-class women like Edith Brittain, and Vera too when she turned 18, supported overseas missions, local churches, the Mothers’ Union, and Girls’ Friendly Society, visited and made clothes for poor families, organised hospital volunteers and fund-raising events.

Vera described the Edwardian era as ‘that unparalleled age of tranquil comfort and rich materialism that, to those of us born at its close, appeared to have gone on from time immemorial, and to be securely destined forever’. To Buxton’s cossetted middle-classes, the social unrest, industrial conflict, and increasingly militant campaigns for women’s suffrage and Irish Home Rule that troubled Britain in the early 1900s seemed remote and irrelevant. In this sheltered society, the outbreak of war in August 1914 seemed to erupt without warning.

Sledging down the Manchester Road, Buxton, early 1900s

Devonshire Hospital, early 1900s

The Empire hotel, one of Buxton’s most opulent, was just up the hill from Vera’s home. After being used as a garrison and military hospital in the First World War, it sank into decline and was demolished in 1964 (PtP).

VERA AND BUXTON

From 600 pages of Testament of Youth, just 60 narrate Vera’s provincial young ladyhood in Buxton, between 1905 when she was 11, and 1915 when she was almost 22. She did not have a good word to say about it:

“I felt trammelled and trapped….I hated Buxton, in spite of the austere beauty of its peaks and dales and the health-giving air … with a detestation that I have never felt since for any set of circumstances …

“[Buxton] stood, and stands for …the estimation of people for what they have, or pretend to have, and not for what they are. Artificial classifications, rigid lines of demarcation that bear no relation whatsoever to intrinsic merit… while contempt for intelligence, suspicion and fear of independent thought, appear to be necessary passports to provincial popularity.”

Vera’s language is relentlessly hyperbolic: ‘my furious Buxton resentments’, ‘hatred’, ‘detestation’, ‘indignation’, ‘resentment’, ‘imprisonment’, ‘being trapped’, the town’s ‘mean censorious spirit’, ‘dull, mentally restricted residents’, ‘the utter futility’ of her existence, and ‘my warfare against Buxton’.

She portrayed her Buxton upbringing as stifling and philistine, her parents as obdurate and unsupportive, her acquaintances as boring, small-minded and censorious, and her escape to university, against great opposition, as a single-handed feminist triumph.

Testament of Youth was not Vera’s first or most critical account of her early life. Her second autobiographical novel, Not Without Honour, published in 1924, set the precedent for her negative portrayal of a stifling, dull and oppressive Edwardian middle-class provincial life in Testament of Youth. Vera said in her memoir that she had never enjoyed anything more than decanting her hatred of Buxton into Not Without Honour.

She never softened her anti-provincialism and her dislike of Buxton in particular, continuing in her letters and journalism to criticise the reactionary, narrow-minded thinking in ‘prosperous and complacent towns like Buxton’, and the vacuous lives of their middle-class female inhabitants.

Biographers have accepted Vera’s one-sided portrayal without challenge.  According to Hilary Bailey, Vera ‘hated Buxton and despised her own rather stuffy provincial background’, had a ‘stultifying empty existence for an energetic girl’ and, with ‘little to do’ except wait for a marriage proposal, was ‘reduced to helping her mother at home’.  A study of Vera’s writing tells readers that ‘growing up in Buxton was a form of imprisonment.’  The preface to the 1980 edition of Testament of Youth informs us that ‘Vera carried on a running battle with her parents to be allowed to go to university and chafed against the claustrophobia of her middle-class existence, the pointlessness of hunt balls’, while the 2004 preface describes Vera’s Buxton years as ‘a living death’.  And, staying faithful to Vera’s portrayal in Testament of Youth, television, film and audiobook dramatisations give audiences a determined, ambitious, rather priggish and humourless, morally-driven young woman.

There is absolutely no doubt that Vera disliked aspects of her early life and gaining a scholarship to Oxford was a significant, inspiring achievement.  But in exaggerating a powerful story of feminist rebellion against her middle-class provincial life, Vera erased many aspects of a personality her mother Edith described as ‘complicated and unusual’’.  Readers, viewers and listeners of Testament of Youth are given no hint of Vera’s youthful enjoyment, frivolity, optimism and exuberance, nor of the advantages her upbringing gave her, nor the ways in which it shaped her interests and achievements.

Published in 2024, Testament of Lost Youth – the Early Life and Loves of Vera Brittain,  a biography of Vera’s early life and its influence on her later success, offers an important corrective to Vera’s very one-sided portrayal and its subsequent endorsements.  Placing her engaging lively voice at the heart of the narrative, its more nuanced account goes beyond the tidied up young protagonist in Testament of Youth.  It highlights just how much of herself Vera lost in the First World War and explains how this period shaped the woman who become one of the twentieth century’s most important literary and political figures.

Vera at Melrose, c1912 (McM)

Vera tobogganing with friends (McM). 

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