Add Information to Record of a Person who served during the Great War on The Wartime Memories Project Website
Add Information to Record of a Person who served during the Great War on The Wartime Memories Project Website
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Patrick Philip William Braybrooke
British Army Royal Fusiliers
Patrick Philip William Braybrooke, F.R.S.L., enlisted on the 21st of Sep 1915 in the Royal Fusiliers and first disembarked 14 Nov 1915. He was discharged 4 Mar 1919 whilst serving with the R.A.M.C. due to sickness. Family memory suggests that during his service overseas he had been subject to gassing, and that this experience continued to have some destabilizing effect throughout his life. His younger brother, though, himself a Sandhurst-educated military officer, considered Patrick as his definition of a hero. He was, after all, a poet, unintended for warfare and wholly unprepared, but this was no deterrent in answering his country's call without hesitation. The opinion was captured in a tape-recorded memoir. Other opinions were less favourable. Three times married, Patrick showed little or no support, financial or otherwise, to the issue of those marriages. His son, Neville Braybrooke, a noted literary critic and author, was the child of Patrick's first marriage, to Lettice Bellairs, who with his mother was abandoned by his father when he was but a toddler. Later, as an adult, Neville was to receive a note, passed along during a lecture he was giving; the note said, "I am your father. Can we meet?" Similarly, Patrick's daughter from a subsequent marriage knew her father very little.
A talented author, Patrick Braybrooke later wrote a number of biographies and works which offer significant insights both into celebrities of the age and into the social history of his time. He was the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Letters, recommended, for one, by kinsman G.K.Chesterton whom he frequently visited at Top Meadow. Commentary on his literary career supercedes that of his military service. Perhaps this entry will serve to balance the scale a tad.