Victor Richardson

(Go to Mobile Version) The story told of Victor Richardson in "Testament of Youth" is a highly romanticised version, and little of his true story and character is actually shown. It serves a purpose, to depict life and the problems and hardships at that time, but not much past his high-spirited personality, his friendships and his sad passing has survived in the film. There are very few written accounts of Victor's life. Not much remains about the young man past a few letters written to his friends and relatives, and not all of those have been published in full. Stories, impressions, reactions are what can be taken from the writings of Vera Brittain and the letters that passed between the small circle of men around her. School reports, lists, official papers, photographs can shed a little more light on his background, maybe, and give an idea of his life beyond his friendships. These pages serve a singular purpose: to gather all the material known about Victor Richardson and hopefully give a deeper insight into the young man.

[victorrichardson]

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England's foam. But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night; As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain. ******* Today marks the day one hundred years ago that Victor Richardson died of the wounds inflicted on him during the first day of the Battle of Arras. Three months he had fought with and finally accepted his fate, that he would forever remain blind. Perhaps deep down he felt that death had him in his grasp a lot firmer than his family and friends thought. He'd escaped from it before, when he'd pulled through a severe case of meningitis that had already claimed his mother the year previously. That remarkable recovery only makes his death more tragic than it already is in itself; how must he have felt, thinking about it? Did he feel death was coming? Could he tell surviving as he had was too good to be true? Or had he given up on himself, in spite of the cheerful acceptance of his blindness that he presented to his family, and wished to die? These were my thoughts today as we stood at his grave for this sad occasion of the centenary of his death. What would he have been, had he lived? His letters have always fascinated me, and I wish there were more, to give a better insight into what he truly was like. I am grateful that Vera Brittain introduced me what little we know of him.

[victorrichardson]

Victor Richardson (18th March 1895 - 9th June 1917)

I N   M E M O R I A M

Only a week later my mother and I went to Chelsea to find the usually cheerful, encouraging Matron with a face grown suddenly grave and personal. There was an unexpected change, she said, in Victor that morning. He had told his nurse that during the night something had ‘clicked’ in his head, like a miniature explosion; since then he had gradually grown vaguer and stranger, and had begun to wander a little… She thought that perhaps it would be wise to send for his people.

We sent for them at once; and later that afternoon, when his father and aunt had come up from Brighton, we returned with them to the hospital. Physically, Victor was there as usual, but the real Victor, no longer restrained by rational probabilities, had meandered off through the grotesque bypaths of delirium. He was quite oblivious to our presence, and when for a moment we turned away from him to talk to his nurse, he plucked the clothes one by one from his bed with gentle deliberation.

We were sent away while he was tidied up and his bed remade, and when we came back he seemed once more himself, courteous as ever and apologetic for having been so ‘queer’. Left alone with him for a few moments while the others went to see the Matron and the doctor, I looked down at his quiet, passive paleness with a sense of heavy finality. So much human wreckage had passed through my hands, but this…. well, this was different.

"Tah - dear Tah," I whispered, in sudden pitying anguish, and I took his fingers in mine and caressed and kissed them, as though he had been a child. Suddenly strong, he gripped my hand, pressed it against his mouth and kissed it convulsively in return. His fingers, I noticed, were damp, and his lips very cold.

That night Victor’s relatives stayed with us in Kensington; the doctor had advised them not to risk returning to Sussex. Next day, just before breakfast, his father was summoned to the public telephone on the ground floor of the flats; my parents had not yet had a private telephone installed. The message was from the hospital, to say that Victor had died in the early hours of the morning.

Victor’s body had already been taken to the mortuary chapel; although the June sunshine outside shone brilliantly and cheerful, the tiny place was ice-cold, and grey as a tomb. Indifferently, but with the mechanical decorum of habit, the orderly lifted the sheet from the motionless figure, so familiar, but in its silent unfamiliarity so terrible an indictment of the inept humanity which condemned its own noblest types to such a fate. I had seen death so often… and yet I felt that I had never seen it so before, for I appeared to be looking at the petrified defencelessness of a child, to whose carven features suffering and experience had once lent the strange illusion of adulthood. With an overwhelming impulse to soften that alien rigidity, I laid my fragrant tribute of roses on the bier, and went quickly away.

(Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth)

*****

Regret to inform you that Lieut. Victor Richardson, 4th Royal Sussex Regt attached 9/K.R.R. died at [2nd London General] hospital this morning.

Cause of Death: G.S.W. (Gunshot wound) temporal region and both eyes blind. Cerebral abscess.

His relatives were notified and were present at death.

(Lt-Col H. Sharpe, report to HQ)

[victorrichardson]

The Battle of Arras - tragedy strikes*

The first day of the Battle of Arras may have been one of great success for British arms, but ut was one of personal tragedy for Victor Richardson. The 14th Light Division had been assigned a particularly formidable task on this day. The 42nd Brigade's share of this task was to capture 'The Harp', a very strong German redoubt about 1,000 yards long from north to south and about half that distance in depth. The redoubt was just north of the point at which the Hindenburg Line entered the old German support system. Down the centre of the redoubt ran, from north to south, a single trench called 'The String'. The 42nd Brigade's initial task was to capture this trench using two battalions in line, the one on the left being the 9th KRRC and the other, the 5th Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. The 5th KSLO would then pass through and capture the Blue Line, the name given to the eastern edge of 'The Harp', thus completing the capture of the whole redoubt.

The beginning of April found Victor's unit, the 9th KRRC, completing its training for the 'big push' at Dainville, on the outskirts of Arras. One of the chores the battalion had to undertake over a couple of nights was the digging of their own assembly trenches, a task successfully completed without attracting the unwelcome attention of the enemy artillery. On the evening of 5 April the Battalion moved into the line, taking over dugouts in the old reserve line. On the afternoon of 7 April they moved to Christchurch cave, one of the network of caves and tunnels which had been prepared under Arras and its southeastern suburbs to be used to shelter and bring forward troops to near to the front line and their jumping off points for the battle in relative security. They found the atmosphere below ground 'somewhat thick and Turkish bath-like and water dripped continually', but these inconveniences were presumably a small price to pay in exchange for the security and protection from the bitter cold outside that their new accommodation provided. During the night of 8/9 April the Battalion emerged from the tunnel and moved into its assembly trenches in preparation for its assault on 'The Harp' redoubt.

At zero hour on 9 April the 3rd Division assaulted the German-held Gateshead Trench and came into line with the 9th KRRC. The assault of the latter began punctually at 07h34; 'A' and 'B' companies each advances on a two platoon front. As soon as they left their assembly trenches they were subjected to heavy machine gun fire from the direction of 'The Harp'; there was, however, no enemy artillery fire. Nevertheless the two companies suffered heavy casualties, including Victor's company commander, who was killed, and this before the first line of enemy wire was reached. The losses did not check the advance, however, and the first enemy trench was captured by 07h50.

Passing over the captured trench 'A' and 'B' Companies lay down under their own barrage for a short period before resuming their advance on the String. As soon as they tried to move forward they came under fire from two machine guns in the German trench and from sniper fire. It must have been at about this time that Victor was wounded for the first time. He was hit in the right arm, had the wound dressed and carried on. The artillery had been less successful in cutting the German wire in front of the String, however, and getting through what was a serious obstacle under machine gun fire led to further serious losses. Victor was one of them, being seriously wounded by what was probably a machine gun bullet through the head. There could be no question of his carrying on this time. He was unconscious and would remain largely so, mainly drug-induced, for days to come.

*Text is an excerpt from  "None that Go Return" by Don Farr, Helion Press (published here by kind permission from Don Farr)

[victorrichardson]

Today marks the centenary of the death of Roland Leighton, Victor's friend and fiancé of Vera Brittain. His family gathered at his grave to hold a memorial service for him. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10153318147036094&substory_index=0&id=135034996093

[victorrichardson]

I found this interesting article on the prevalence of the disease Victor got infected with in early January 1915, complete with a memoranda to camps and personnel on how to proceed if an outbreak was suspected. Further research in how many cases of the disease appeared at Horsham camp is still ongoing.

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On Armistice Day: The Immortal Shrine, Will Longstaff: if marching 4 abreast the dead would take 3 1/2 days to pass the Cenotaph. #LestWeForget

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Arrival Report - when Victor arrived at the Hospital in Chelsea, a report had to be written about his journey from the hospital in Rouen to London. It has all the information about what ship he traveled on, how long it took.

Since Victor could not sign the report himself, Edward Brittain, who was there at the time as a visitor, filled out this report and signed it.

[victorrichardson]

'Punch' some time ago had an essay in the 'Watch Dogs' Series on 'a little word of six letters' which epitomises the Army's view of the War. If taken literally it is, alas, no exaggeration - it is a shorter word than sanguinary - and figuratively it really expresses the whole situation, but my one fear in case of my safe return is that I may be perpetually uttering it in the drawing room.

Victor on what the army thinks of the war (Source: letter to Vera Brittain, 24th March, 1917. Printed in Letters from a Lost Generation)

[childliketendencies]

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. While Victor was still recuperating and waiting for a medical board to pronounce him fit for duty, his friend Edward Brittain was involved in the fighting and got wounded on that day. For his actions he received a Military Cross.

“While his company was waiting to go over, the wounded from an earlier part of the attack began to crowd into the trenches. Then part of the regiment in front began to retreat, throwing Edward’s men into a panic. He had to return to the trenches twice to exhort them to follow him over the parapet. About ninety yards along No-Man’s-Land, Edward was hit by a bullet through his thigh. He fell down and crawled into a shell hole. Soon afterwards a shell burst close to him and a splinter from it went through his left arm. The pain was so great that for the first time he lost his nerve and cried out. After about an hour and a half, he noticed that the machine-gun fire was slackening, and started a horrifying crawl back through the dead and wounded to the safety of the British trenches.” (Source: Mark Bostridge, Letters from a Lost Generation)

This day changed him very much. Both Victor and Vera agreed that afterwards he seemed at least 10 years older. He spent some time recuperating from his wound, and was then posted on Home Duty until June 1917, when he rejoined his regiment, the 11th Sherwood Forresters, on the Western Front.

[victorrichardson]

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you’ll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto, “yet many a better one has died before.” Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.

- Capt. Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895 - 1915), Suffolk Regiment

[victorrichardson]

Lest We Forget: Lt. Victor Richardson, M.C., died today 98 years ago. Requiescam in Pace.

[victorrichardson]

Hello, I am very curious about Victor Richardson. I am currently reading "Testament of Youth" and have watched the film (exams got in the way of me reading it for a while). Is there any evidence to say Victor actually did have feelings for Vera?

This is something I've discussed a bit with some of the "experts", since it just plagued me to no end that they would advertise it as a "love triangle". There is no written evidence that says point blank that Victor was in love with her. He had very little to do with her before Roland's death, actually; they only bonded over that event. He had been to the Brittains' home a few times before then, and spent time in her company with her brother and Roland present, but she doesn't mention in her diary nor in Testament that she knew of any infatuation with her that Victor might've had (she mentions other boys who did, but not him, so if he did then he wasn't obvious about it). The first mention of him in her diary (which is a lot more truthful than Testament) is when Roland mentioned Victor had caught meningitis. During the correspondence following that, between Edward and Roland, they mention that Victor had been a "confirmed bachelor" but had a fling (of some kind) with a nurse at the hospital. So it seems he was very much in a different world than the one Vera moved in until Roland's death.All that is no conclusive proof that he did not have feelings for Vera, of course. But I don't think he would have given her a second thought once it became clear that Roland and Vera were serious about each other. There could of course be a chance of it after Roland was gone and Victor had started corresponding with Vera. Certainly he admired her quite a lot, and felt he shared something with her - being left behind while all others were out there doing their duty. But at the same time she was above him in his view of things, since she actually had to deal with the war in a more dire way than he did until he went to the front. If there was ever more than admiration is unclear then, also. He still seems to have thought her very much Roland's girl. In fact, Roland and Vera seem to inhabit the same kind of pedestal in his life - he was very close to Roland and missed him and thought if Roland had been alive at any given time in the months afterwards, Roland would have been able to drive away any fears and doubts and make his life better. Vera came close to that but she wasn't quite as familiar to him. Something that always struck me as interesting in their correspondence is that as soon as he got to the front, there is a different tone in his letters to her. He knew her well enough before then to know her faults and call her out on them (which, to be honest, I always took as an indication that he admired but never loved her in a romantic way) but she had been on that pedestal nevertheless. But once he had gotten a first whiff of the action and life at the front, he started to sound impatient and even irritated with her, who had not actually experienced war in all its forms (she had not been to Etaples then) but seemed to want to dictate how he should think or feel. Her troubles became abstract to him, and his behavior was difficult for her to understand, as he seemed so happy to embrace soldiering after claiming to have been against it before. He grew up so rapidly that he too, as before Edward had, surpassed her petty troubles.And all that becomes null and void when he was wounded. Whether he was in love with her or not, I think he probably would have either consented himself, or let himself be pushed into consenting by a family who was at a loss with how to deal with his blindness, to a marriage with Vera, had he survived. Because despite all the positive thinking he had pressed on him, being blind was very much worse than death in anyone's mind, and I don't think he, who had been so prone to rely on others to help him out of troubles, would have been able to turn down an offer from Vera to be by his side and help him navigate this dreadful bleak life ahead.I hope this answers your question at least a little bit.

[victorrichardson]

Vera Brittain to her brother Edward, 6th May 1917:

You say that you & I must make things worth while to Victor as his family is inadequate for dealing with the situation, & mother says that in future days ‘he must be our especial care.’ I have thought a great deal about both your letters. No one could realise better than I our responsibility towards him - not only because of our love for him, but because of his love for us, & the love felt for him by the One we loved & lost. I am not sure that this doesn’t apply more to me than to any of you. I at any rate know this, that I should be more glad than I can say to offer him a very close & life-long devotion if he would accept it, & I can’t imagine that Roland, if He had known what was to be - if He knows - would be anything but glad too. Those two are beyond any aid of ours - They who have died; and the only way to repay even one little bit of the debt to Them is through the one who remains: ‘Happiness,’ said Olive Schreiner, ‘is a great love and much serving.’ For his sake - for all our sakes - there is nothing I would not do for him...

She never talked about this to Victor in reality - whether this was because she was not certain of this path herself or whether she simply didn’t get to it before his health deteriorated, is unclear.

[victorrichardson]

Vera Brittain writes in Testament of Youth, May 1917:

I found Victor in bed in the garden [of the 2nd London General Hospital], his pale fingers lethargically exploring a big book of braille. [...]  I saw no trace on that day, nor any of the successive afternoons on which I visited him, of the bitterness that Edward had mentioned; he seemed to have accepted his fate, to have embarked upon the conquest of braille, and to have compared, with a slight bias in favour of the former, the merits of an East End curacy with schoolmastering as a career for a blinded man. Captain Ian Fraser of St Dunstan’s - then also recently blinded - came several times to visit him, and told him of the work that had already been done in making other sightless officers independent and self-supporting. The news of these experiments gradually stimulated his own determination, and he was ready, as soon as his curiously obstinate head wound had healed, to divert the energy with which he had made himself into a soldier to the reconstruction of his future. 

[victorrichardson]

Vera Brittain, May 1917:

[...] His head was still copiously bandaged, and one brown eye, impotently open, stared glassily into fathomless blackness. If I had not been looking for him I should not have known him; his face seemed to have emptied and diminished until what was visible of it was almost devoid of expression. ‘Hallo, Tah!’ I said, as casually as I could, self-consciously anxious to keep the shock of his appearance out of my voice.

He did not answer, but stiffened all over like a dog suddenly hearing its master’s call in the distance; the drooping lethargy disappeared, and his mouth curved into the old listening look of half-cynical intelligence. ‘Do you know who it is, Tah?’ I asked him, putting my hand on his. 'Tah!' he repeated, hesitating, expectant - and then all at once, with a ring of unmistakable joy in his voice, 'Why - it's Vera!'

All that afternoon we sat and talked. The world had closed in around him; he definitely discouraged the description of loveliness that he could no longer see, of activities that he could never again share, and at first seemed interested only in discussing the visits of his friends and the hospital detail of every day. But of his complete rationality there could be no question, and with time and the miraculous adaptability of the blind, the wider outlook would certainly return. [...]

[victorrichardson]

A question!

You, who follow this account - do you think it a bad idea to use images from the film to illustrate quotes from the letters and mentions? I’m undecided about it. It’s difficult to raise more awareness of this site without using the film, but there aren’t enough pictures of Victor and his life which survived to illustrate anything. 

[victorrichardson]

At around September the 20th Victor was ordered to the Western front, where he and three other Royal Sussex officers were to be temporarily attached to the 9th (Service) Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. He left on the 28th from London’s Charing Cross station. He did not join his new battalion until the 12th of October; most likely he, as so many before him, had to pass through Étaples Army Base Camp for a few days before taking transport to the front line.

>>Étaples is a very old fishing town and port, which lies at the mouth of the River Canche in the region of Pas de Calais in Picardy. The Étaples Army Base Camp, the largest of its kind ever established overseas by the British, was built along the railway adjacent to the town. It was served by a network of railways, canals, and roads connecting the camp to the southern and eastern fields of battle in France and to ships carrying troops, supplies, guns, equipment, and thousands of men and women across the English Channel. It was a base for British, Canadian, Scottish and Australian forces. The camp was a training base, a depot for supplies, a detention centre for prisoners, and a centre for the treatment of the sick and wounded, with almost twenty general hospitals. At its peak, the camp housed over 100,000 people; altogether, its hospitals could treat 22,000 patients. With its vast conglomeration of the wounded, of prisoners, of soldiers training for battle, and of those simply waiting to return to the front, Étaples could appear a dark place.<< (Source: Through these Lines)

“It is a vast dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England but a kind of paddock where the beasts were kept a few days before the shambles. There is a very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look which a man will never see in England nor currently see in any battle, only in Étaples. It was not despair or terror. It was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look and without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted and no actor will ever seize it.” - Wilfred Owen 

“Étaples was distant from Boulogne, the port of disembarkation in France, by a march of 18 miles, which was the first test of the fitness of the men as they arrived in France. Etaples consisted of a tented encampment for 100,000 men. The men (to whom it was often 'Eatapples' or 'Heeltaps' ) breakfasted at 5.45 am and were in the bullring from 7 in the morning till 5.30 in the evening. They were under the command of officers and N.C.O.s, 'canaries' because of the yellow armbands they wore, who treated them with a pathological viciousness born more of a sense of guilt because they were not going to face the real dangers that their victims were, than from a desire to prepare the men for realities from which they had been sheltered at base in Britain. The bullring was vast, a far greater area than one would have thought necessary, an unforgiving white plateau of beaten sand, riven by deep fissures. When Queen Mary visited the camp in 1917, she protected herself with a parasol against the sun and the bright light of the coast, but the men trained without protection. They drilled and practised unarmed face-to-face combat. They underwent bayonet training, bomb or hand-reared drill, and were goaded by their tormentors as they sweated up hills of sand in full kit.”  - in Arras, 1917, by Walter Reid