- Born
- 8 September 1886Matfield, England
- Died
- 1 September 1967Heytesbury, England · aged 80
Siegfried Sassoon
A decorated officer who protested publicly against the First World War – and whose great loves before his marriage were men.
Siegfried Sassoon grew up in Kent in a wealthy family; his father came from the Jewish Sassoon merchant dynasty. He studied at Cambridge without taking a degree and lived as a country gentleman, hunting and writing poems.
In the First World War he served as an officer on the Western Front, where his reckless courage earned him the nickname “Mad Jack” and the Military Cross. His war poems showed the horror of the trenches with bitter irony. In 1917 he publicly protested against the continuation of the war. Instead of being court-martialled, he was sent to the Craiglockhart military hospital, where he met and encouraged the young poet Wilfred Owen.
Sassoon was aware early on that he loved men. After the war he had relationships with men, among them the composer and actor Ivor Novello and, for several years, the aristocrat Stephen Tennant. His diaries, published later, document these relationships. In 1933 he married Hester Gatty, with whom he had a son; the marriage later broke down.
His fictionalised autobiography, the “Sherston trilogy”, became a classic. In old age he converted to Catholicism. He died in 1967, aged 80.