In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

Penguin Books, 2023 385 pages Softback

XWI.823

A heart wrenching and emotional read, with themes of love and loss, this book will stay with you for a long time.

The story begins in 1914 and centres around two students who attend Preshute, the upper-class boys boarding school nestled in the idyllic Wiltshire countryside. Henry Gaunt, a reserved and quiet half-German boy, and his best friend Sidney Ellwood, a confident charmer and amateur poet, have been best friends for years, but both have a secret; they are hopelessly in love with each other.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Gaunt enlists to fight to protect his German family, and because he is terrified of his feelings for Ellwood at a time when homosexuality is illegal. With the patriotic desire to fight for King and Country, one by one Ellwood and his Preshutian friends, many of whom are too young to fight, follow Gaunt into the trenches, and one by one, many of them do not make it home. Throughout the book, you are captivated by Winn’s vivid depiction of war. I was glued to the pages and lived the love, loss and sorrow that Gaunt and Ellwood experience in their harrowing adventures alongside them.

In the ‘historical note’ section at the end of the book, it is stated that Preshute is based on Marlborough College, where Winn herself went to school. The name is either inspired by the college house of Preshute, or the parish of Preshute, which lies next to Marlborough, includes the small hamlet of Clatford, and which once included the college within its boundaries.

The amount of research that Winn undertook for this book is astounding. Throughout the novel, she includes extracts from ‘The Preshutian’, the Preshute school newspaper that contains lists of the dead, and ‘In Memoriam’ passages describing students’ lives and how they died. By using the Marlborough College online World War One Archive, Winn created her lists of the dead by assembling names from the real lists of the dead from the Marlburian, the Marlborough College magazine. Her ‘In Memoriams’ are also real and are taken from the Marlburian, which makes reading the book even more heart-breaking and raw.

Winn also chose the names of many of her characters from the cricket teams of Marlborough college, and drew inspiration for Ellwood from Siegfried Sassoon (the famous World War One war poet who attended the school) by examining college records provided by the Marlborough college Archivist. Like Sassoon’s poems, Ellwood’s character, along with many young men that went to fight, starts as a romanticist ready to fight for King and Country, and is slowly altered by the horrors of war.

This is masterfully written novel, which I would highly recommend.

This book is available to view at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre’s public access library under the shelf number XWI.823

You can also access some of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems here: https://allpoetry.com/Siegfried-Sassoon

Sophie Bunce, Community History Advisor