Max Beerbohm (1872 - 1956) was a critic, essayist and caricaturist. His caricatures were collected in various volumes including A Christmas Garland which was published in 1912, and which Edmund Gosse introduced Siegfried Sassoon to when Sassoon was visiting Gosse. His one completed novel, Zuleika Dobson was published in 1911. It is an ironic romance of Oxford undergraduate life. As a half brother of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max was a brilliant dramatic critic of the Saturday Review from 1898 to 1910, succeeding George Bernard Shaw. In 1910 he married an American actress, Florence Kahn and went to live in Rapallo, Italy (except for the duration of the two World Wars). His broadcast talks from 1935 were a brilliant stylistic accomplishment. A month before his death he married Elizabeth Jungmann.

Arnold Bennet (1867 - 1931) worked as a clerk in London before establishing himself as a writer. His first novel, A Man from the North was published in 1898. In 1926 at the suggestion of his friend, Lord Beaverbrook, he began writing an influential weekly article on books for the Evening Standard. He wrote several successful plays, but his fame rests largely on his novels, one of the best known of which is Anna of the Five Towns, set in the area in which he lived as a youth - the Potteries. Sassoon was introduced to Bennet by Robert Ross.

Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867 - 1962) had entered the family business as a coal merchant on the early death of his father. However his close friendships with John Ruskin and William Morris from 1885 onwards led him to give up this job in order to become secretary to Morris in 1891, and then secretary to the Kelmscott Press (founded by Morris & others). After Morris's death in 1896 Cockerell became secretary and factotum to the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, to whom he introduced Sassoon in 1919. He became Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, a position which made his name. Bringing both his enormous energy and his business knowledge to bear on the traditionally sleepy and conservative job, Cockerell transformed a dreary and uninteresting provincial gallery into a fine display of treasures. (He was helped in acquiring these treasures by a talent for fund-raising.) Cockerell introduced Sassoon to Edward Dent, another Cambridge man, in 1915.

Edward Dent (1876 - 1957) was well known to Edward Marsh. He was a well respected musicologist when he and Sassoon met in 1915. He had already written books on Scarlatti and Mozart by 1915 and was to become Professor of Music at Cambridge University in 1926. He and Sassoon became immediate friends, sharing the same sense of humour and a love of music. (Sassoon loved listening to music although at the time he was an indifferent performer on the piano.) It is quite possible that Dent introduced Sassoon to E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and A. T. Bartholomew, who were members of Dent's circle of friends.

C. M. Doughty (1843 - 1926) is principally remembered for his remarkable record of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) carried out in 1876-8, which was republished in 1921 with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence. He also wrote volumes of verse, including The Dawn in Britain (published in 6 volumes in 1906). Sassoon read both Travels and The Dawn, and wrote to tell the author of his accomplishment of reading The Dawn "all through" !

John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) trained for the law then turned to literature. Famous for the Forsyte Saga, the first novel of which was published in 1906, he was also a playwright. He also wrote poetry and in 1932 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Edmund Gosse (1849 - 1928) was a transcriber at the British Museum, and in 1875 became a translator at the Board of Trade. He made an acquaintance with the pre-Raphaelites. From 1904 he was librarian of the House of Lords where he exercised considerable power and influence. He wrote critical essays for the Sunday Times, poetry and several "Lives" including those of Gray, Congreve, Donne, Jeremy Taylor, Coventry Patmore, Ibsen and Swinburne. Perhaps his most famous book is the autobiographical Father and Son, about his relationship with his father, Philip, who was an eminent zoologist and fanatical fundamentalist Christian. He was an early influence on Siegfried Sassoon in matters of literary taste, and his wife Tessa Gosse was a friend of Sassoon's mother, Theresa.

T. E. Lawrence (1888 - 1933) is more famously known as "Lawrence of Arabia". Educated at Oxford, he studied Arabic, read Doughty and from 1910 to 1914 worked on the excavation of Carchemish, on the banks of the river Euphrates. He became involved with British Intelligence, and his daring exploits during the First World War won him the confidence of the Arabs. He enlisted in the RAF in 1922 as an aircraft hand under the name of John Hume Ross, and a year later joined the tank corps as T. E. Shaw. He began writing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the Arab Revolt and his part in it, shortly after the war. It was privately printed in 1926, and published in 1935.

Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1956) published many volumes of verse for both adults and children including, for adults The Listeners and The Traveller - a long visionary poem, and for children Peacock Pie and Tom Tiddler's Ground. Amongst prose works he wrote the novel Henry Brocken and The Return. His volumes of short stories included many arresting or bizarre tales. He also wrote essays and critical studies, including in 1919 a study of Rupert Brooke.

Edward Marsh (1872 - 1953) was a classicist and scholar. Between 1912 and 1922 he edited five highly influential volumes of Georgian Poetry. He was a friend of many poets, including Rupert Brooke (whose executor he was, and whose Collected Poems he edited in 1918), and Siegfried Sassoon. Edward Marsh was one of Sassoon's first sponsors as far as publishing was concerned. He made many translations of classical and French authors; and in 1939 he published A Number of People, reminiscences of his many friends in the literary and political worlds. Marsh was also personal secretary to Winston Churchill.

Robert Ross (1869 - 1918) was a Canadian authority on art, and literary executor of Oscar Wilde, and a literary journalist. He was a patron of the arts and had many distinguished and promising artists and writers visit him during his life in London. He produced a comprehensive edition of Wilde's works (1908). Sassoon was a frequent visitor to his London home, and Ross was one of only two people (the other being Dr Rivers) allowed to see Sassoon whilst he was recovering from the head wound which invalided him out of the war. He died unexpectedly of heart failure on the eve of leaving for Australia.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was apprenticed to a draper in early life. For some years, whilst in poor health, he struggled as a teacher, studying and writing articles in his spare time. His literary output was vast and extremely varied. As a novelist he's probably best remembered for his scientific romances, among the earliest products of the new genre of science fiction. The first The Time Machine was published in 1895. His other best-known book of this genre is The War of the Worlds (1898) which allegedly caused widespread panic when aired on the radio for the first time in America in 1938. Sassoon read Mr Britling Sees it Through in 1916 (when it was published) and it affected him powerfully, since he felt Wells was the first author to suggest that perhaps the war was not necessarily being fought for the right reasons. Wells supported Sassoon's anti-war protest, unlike Bennet (both men wrote to Sassoon at Craiglockhart War Hospital). But Sassoon remained friends with both men.

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© Michèle Fry, 1998.

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