December 18, 2009
Cambridge University Library has taken delivery of the personal archive of war poet Siegfried Sassoon, marking the culmination of a six-month, £1.25 million campaign to save the collection for the nation.
Retained in the possession of the poet’s son until his death in 2006, the Sassoon Archive was the most important collection of any major First World War poet’s papers still remaining in private hands.
The collection includes the war diaries Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine between 1915 and 1918, together with notebooks ranging from records of his schoolboy cricket scores to post-war journals tracing his turbulent personal life and the progress of his literary career.
Sassoon’s childhood and wartime experiences profoundly shaped the development of his writing life, and the archive also contains drafts of his classic autobiographical trilogy The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey.
When the Archive came on the market last year, Cambridge University Library was immediately identified as the most suitable home for the collection. Sassoon was an undergraduate at the University and later became an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, and the University Library has for many years been a leading institution in the preservation of his autograph manuscripts and letters. The combination of the Library’s extensive existing Sassoon holdings and the new material has created the world’s pre-eminent resource for the study of Sassoon’s life and works.
University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “We are delighted to have secured the future of the Sassoon archive, and to be able to make these extraordinary documents available in the University Library. This outcome is a source of both satisfaction and excitement to all those who have worked so hard to make it possible.”
The purchase has been made possible by generous funding from charitable institutions, grant-awarding bodies, and members of the general public. The National Heritage Memorial Fund offered a grant of £550,000 and other substantial grants have been made by The Monument Trust, the J. P. Getty Jr Trust and Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement, augmented by valuable support from bodies such as the Friends of the National Libraries, the B. H. Breslauer Foundation, the John Murray Charitable Trust, Clare College Cambridge, and the Library’s own Friends organisation. Many private individuals, convinced that the Archive should remain intact and accessible in the United Kingdom, contributed sums ranging from a few pounds to thousands of pounds.
The Library’s success in meeting its fundraising challenge has been widely welcomed. Author Sebastian Faulks, whose acclaimed novel Birdsong revolves around soldiers’ experience of the First World War and the memory of succeeding generations, said: “This is a major coup for Cambridge University Library, and the papers will be of huge benefit to scholars both of literature and of history.”
Poet Sir Andrew Motion said: “The Sassoon Archive that has been acquired by the University Library is of the greatest importance, nationally and internationally. As a memoirist and as a poet, Sassoon occupies a unique place in the history of writing in English – someone who combines writerly, political and social significance to an exceptional degree. Their purchase is wonderful news.”
The Archive will now be conserved, sorted and catalogued by the University Library’s professional staff. In July 2010 a major display of the Library’s Sassoon collections will open in its Exhibition Centre, bringing together documents from the newly-acquired Archive and a selection of the Library’s other Sassoon treasures.
Exhibitions Officer and literary manuscripts specialist John Wells said of the war diaries: “Everyone who sees these documents is thrilled by the vital immediacy and poignancy of the meaning they convey. We can hardly wait to put them on show to the public next year.”
Members of the press, please email Stuart Roberts, University of Cambridge Communications Officer, for more information: sjr81@admin.cam.ac.uk or call 01223 764982.
Notes to editors
1. For 600 years the University Library has been central to the support of teaching and research at Cambridge. More than eight million books and periodicals, one million maps and many thousands of manuscripts occupy more than one hundred miles of shelving, which extends by a further two miles every year. The Library collections vary hugely in age and content. Chinese oracle bones from the second millennium BC can be found alongside the latest online scientific journals; illuminated decorations in medieval manuscripts can be studied as originals and as digitised images delivered over the Internet.
2. Highlights of the University Library’s special collections include the papers of Isaac Newton, an archive of Charles Darwin’s correspondence, archives of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society and a copy of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, the earliest European example of a book produced using moveable type.
3. As a legal deposit library since 1710, the Library is entitled to acquire a copy of each book and journal published in the UK and Ireland, which results in a rich and diverse collection providing future scholars with the raw materials for research in many fields.
4. With 2 million of its volumes on open shelves, readers have the largest open-access collection in Europe immediately available to them.
5. An exhibition space at the University Library makes a selection of its outstanding collections available for view to the public. Information about current and forthcoming exhibitions can be found at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions.