THE BRITTAINS
Born on 29th December 1893 in a modest villa in Brampton, Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire, Vera Mary Brittain was the elder child of (Thomas) Arthur Brittain (1864–1935) and Edith Mary (Bervon) Brittain (1868–1948). Arthur was a prosperous businessman and partner in Brittains Limited, a highly successful paper-manufacturing company that had evolved from the paper mill established by his grandfather. In 1891, Arthur married Edith Bervon, daughter of an impoverished but genteel family whose father, Inglis Bervon, was a Welsh-born organist and choirmaster. Without pedigree or money, Arthur’s family considered Edith an unsuitable prospect for marriage. As for Edith, a proposal for marriage from a wealthy, aspirational businessman was virtually impossible to turn down.
Arthur and Edith Brittain, early 1900s (SC )
Arthur Brittain (McM)
Vera aged 4, Edward aged 2, 1897 (McM)
When Vera was 18 months old, the family moved to Macclesfield in 1895 where the second child, Edward Harold, was born that year. Schooled at home by Miss Newby, their ‘adored’ governess at home and having very little contact with other children, the two formed a close relationship that would grow stronger over the years.
Vera and Edward, Buxton 1914, (McM)
Vera at Melrose, 1912 (SC)
EDUCATION
In 1905 the Brittains moved to Buxton, an elegant, fashionable spa town in Derbyshire. After being educated at home by a governess, Arthur and Edith sent Vera to the Grange, the largest of Buxton’s four preparatory schools for girls and Edward to Holm Leigh. Both schools were in walking distance of their new home in Buxton.
After two years at the Grange, Vera went to St. Monica’s in Kingswood near Reigate in Surrey, run by her mother’s sister Florence Bervon, and Florence’s business partner and friend, Louise Heath-Jones who had been educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.
Vera threw herself enthusiastically into school life and praised St Monica’s as ‘refreshingly broad minded and enlightened’ compared to other girls’ schools at the time, it had a profound and lasting influence on her. St Monica’s encouraged pupils to engage with ideas and current affairs, and also introduced Vera to more challenging and radical ideas through the work of John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning, William Morris and H.G. Wells.
Brought up in a home with few books, Vera developed an insatiable appetite for literature. And, interested in religious questions from an early age, she was very taken with Robert Elsmere (1888), a bestselling, highly controversial novel about the Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ in the Anglican church. A bold choice for a girls’ private school, it converted Vera from ‘an unquestioning if somewhat indifferent churchgoer into an anxiously interrogative agnostic’.
From the 1890s, activists in the women’s suffrage movement had succeeding in pushing some schools to do more than simply equip girls with feminine attributes to attract a husband and run a home. While the quality of middle-class girls’ education was still much more variable than it was for boys, schools were starting to include elements of a masculine curriculum and extra-curricular activities, alongside traditional feminine subjects.
Families with an attractive, marriageable daughter like Vera Brittain regarded the need for a woman not to earn a living as a reflection of a family’s social status. Yet even if Arthur and Edith had been more open-minded about the possibility of a career for Vera, the only occupations available to most women from her background became a private governess, ladies’ companion or teacher, occupations they had to give up if they married.
Vera described Heath-Jones as a ‘brilliant dynamic woman’, religiously idealistic and an ‘ardent but discreet feminist’. Although the teacher took a particular interest in her clever, motivated pupil, teachers and headmistresses with feminist sympathies were caught up in conflicting aspirations for intelligent, ambitious girls like Vera. St Monica’s supported the advancement of women alongside older values associated with Victorian femininity but, like Vera’s parents, her teachers assumed she would marry rather than go to university and have a career.
Louise Heath Jones, date unknown (Daniel Brittain-Catlin)
Florence Bervon, date unknown (McM)
Vera aged 14 (SC)
Vera aged 17 (SC)
Just before her eighteenth birthday at the end of 1911, Vera finished school and returned to live in Buxton. In January 1913, Vera and her mother attended a course of ‘extension’ lectures in social history run by the University of Oxford at Buxton town hall Oxford. Taught by the eminent historian and director what is now the university’s Department of Continuing Education, John Marriot, the lectures were a turning point in Vera’s plans for the future.
Encouraged by Marriott and Mrs Harrison, the local organiser of the lectures in Buxton, Vera entered a competition for entrance to Oxford’s 1913 Summer School. This inspired her to apply to study English at Somerville College in Oxford. Contrary to claims in Testament of Youth about her ‘battle royal’ against parental and local opposition, Arthur and Edith paid for the private tutor Vera needed to prepare for the examinations and were immensely proud when she was awarded an exhibition (scholarship) to Somerville College. Other Buxton figures also encouraged Vera’s university ambitions (see Testament of Lost Youth). In the summer of that year, Vera gained entrance to the university itself by passing the Oxford Senior Local exam. In the 1920s, Vera acknowledged the importance of Oxford’s provincial extension lectures becoming an extension lecturer herself.
Vera on steps outside morning room at Melrose,
her Buxton home, 1912 (McM)