Robert Graves

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in... Sassoon's view, were responsible for a vainglorious war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy". Siegfried Sassoon was born and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named "Weirleigh" , in Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother. His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon , son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family. For marrying outside the faith he was disinherited. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Siegfried's family; his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Wagner's operas.
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William Halse Rivers Rivers, FRCP, FRS, – 4 June 1922 was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with shell-shocked soldiers during World War I. Rivers's most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He is also famous for his... participation in the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, and his consequent seminal work on the subject of kinship. Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent, son of Elizabeth Hunt and Henry Frederick Rivers . Records from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show the Rivers family to be solidly middle-class with many Cambridge, Church of England and Royal Navy associations, the most famous of which were Midshipman William Rivers and his father Gunner Rivers who both served aboard HMS Victory. The senior Rivers, also called William, was the master gunner aboard The Victory and it is thanks to his commonplace book that many of the thoughts of the sailors aboard Nelson's flagship are preserved.
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