Can Buxton find a home in its heart for Vera?

The feminist and pacifist campaigner was a beacon of freedom to women and peace lovers around the world. In her day, she was an international celebrity, selling hundreds of thousands of books, and being greeted like a modern-da rock star by adoring crowds on British and American tours.

Her ground-breaking First World War memoir, Testament of Youth, has been adapted for television, cinema and ballet and translated into 7 languages. It is on the school curriculum and university reading lists, while Vera’s life and work are subjects for academic research, blogs and social media. Her influence is globally recognised.

So why has Buxton all but rejected her as a favourite daughter? Her formative years were spent in the town, from 1905 when she was 11 to 1915 when she was almost 22. Yet there is no public commemoration, just one brass plate in the Pavilion (currently not on show) a ceramic plaque outside ‘Melrose’, her home on what is now 151 Park Road and a photo montage in the Buxton branch of Wetherspoons.

Individual admirers paid for these plaques and there is little civic interest in a formal, more high profile public commemoration of Buxton’s most significant resident. Few Buxton residents or visitors seem to have heard of her at all, and amongst those who have, it seems that Vera’s remorseless criticism of the town over a hundred years ago still rankles.

Vera Brittain certainly didn’t pull any punches in her public portrayals of a stuffy, snobbish, stifling provincial town. Through journalism, novels and memoirs, Vera’s merciless criticisms often bordered on hyperbole. According to Testament of Youth, “I hated Buxton…with a detestation that I have never felt for any set of circumstances”. She described its residents as ‘mentally restricted’, censorious and dull.

But was ‘hatred’ and ‘detestation’ of Vera’s stifling ‘provincial young ladyhood’ the whole truth about her Buxton decade? Inspired by living in Melrose, the Brittains’ Buxton home, Kathryn Ecclestone’s book Testament of Lost Youth: the Early Life and Loves of Vera Brittain, published by Pen & Sword, draws on her extensive unpublished diary and letters to reveal a more nuanced, much richer story.

At the heart of the narrative is Vera’s own lively, engaging voice, revealing just how much this period influenced Vera’s feminist and political views, her feelings about love, marriage and religion, and shaped her exceptional and unusual character. In place of the rather priggish, morally serious, rebellious young woman of her memoir, Vera’s diary highlights the exuberant, optimistic, frivolous side of her personality. This makes the story of how the First World War, as she put it, ‘smashed up’ her youth even more poignant.

And Kathryn’s book gives us a fresh portrait of Buxton itself, its unique origins as an upper class-spa resort and its heyday as a booming middle-class town that offered families like the Brittains a tranquil, gilded lifestyle before the First World War crashed everything into tragedy with the deaths of her beloved brother, fiance and their friends.

Kathryn, who began her career in education in 1985 as a lecturer at Buxton’s former High Peak College of Further Education, set out, initially, to write a tourist booklet – ‘Buxton through the eyes of Vera Brittain’ or something like that, but it quickly snowballed into a biography,” said Kathryn.

“Snippets of her diary, published in Chronicle of Youth in the 1980s, gave fleeting hints that Vera’s public portrayal of her time in Buxton was very one-sided. But it wasn’t until I was able to get a copy of her complete unpublished diary from the Vera Brittain archive in McMaster University, Ontario, that I realised just how much is missing from Vera’s memoir’.

She added: “I’ve tried to highlight just how much this extraordinary, intriguing woman lost in the First World War, and how her formative years in a vibrant, fashionable town were a crucial foundation for her later success as one of the 20th century’s most important literary and political figures.

“Writing a biography of such an impressive and inspiring woman was quite a daunting departure from my old life in higher education,” said Kathryn, a retired professor at the University of Sheffield, who wrote books on education as well as journalism for national publications. “I hope I’ve done justice not just to Vera and those she loved but also to Buxton”.

At an event hosted by the Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust at the end of last year, Kathryn discussed her book with conversation with John Phillips, former Editor of the Buxton Advertiser.

John said: “This is a book which is long overdue. I remember as a young reporter in the 1980s attending the unveiling ceremony in the Pavilion Gardens of the brass plaque to commemorate Vera’s time here. Despite – or more likely because – it was being hosted by Vera’s famous daughter, the politician Shirley Williams, who had tried to break the political tug-of-war between Labour and Conservatives by co-founding the Social Democratic Party, the event was freakishly low-key.

“Although the High Peak swings between Labour and Conservative control, it seemed that, for once, the politically great and good were united in their indifference to the upstart daughter of a writer who famously hadn’t liked being here,” he said.

“Had Kathryn’s work been available then, things might have been different. Having read the book, it became clear to me that Buxton’s negative feelings about a woman who has had such an impact on the world only really makes sense if you don’t understand what Buxton was like when she grew up here.”

There are many “estate towns” created by wealthy landowners in Britain, but Buxton was unusual in being the product of just one family’s vision and for much of its existence entirely under their control.

The Cavendish family engineered a highly segregated town to attract wealthy residents and visitors, similar, in some ways, to Simla which was created in the Indian highlands as a retreat for colonial rulers during the British Raj. In Buxton, the once-separate working class villages of Burbage, Fairfield and Harpur Hill, and terraced streets built for artisans and tradesmen ensured a social distance between the privileged middle-classes and those who served them. And servants were not allowed in the Pavilion Gardens unless their employers added them to their annual subscription. In Vera’s case, her very unorthodox friendship with a controversial socialist vicar did bring her, unusually and untypically for a woman of her background, into the heart of Fairfield.

“This came as a surprise. I’ve lived here all my life and written about the town for the past 50 years, but it wasn’t until I read Kathryn’s insightful and moving book that I came to realise the truth about Buxton’s origins, and how unique its creation was.”

The Dukes of Devonshire not only owned the land, but controlled all developments, right down to the details of house design. In doing so they helped to guide the creation of so many of its wonderful historic buildings, starting with the Crescent, the UK’s largest unsupported dome at the University of Derby’s Buxton campus in the former Devonshire Royal Hospital, and the Pavilion Gardens.

Vera’s parents hoped she would spend time after leaving boarding school in Surrey as a social butterfly, flitting around this gilded cage in search of a good marriage, but her burning desire for an education and service in English and French front-line hospitals during the First World War turned her into a leading light in Britain’s feminist and peace movements.

“And some of the people she met in Buxton, including an independent businesswoman and that radical vicar in Fairfield, became formative influences on her life,” said Phillips.

“Kathryn’s book is essential reading for anyone who wants to really understand not just Vera Brittain and her times, but the town itself. It’s an important contribution not only to Buxton’s history but also to its future as it struggles yet again with serious threats to its built heritage.”

After ceasing all degree level teaching at the Devonshire Dome, the University of Derby has said it is likely that the building will be up for sale in four years time and the newly- restored Crescent hotel is seeking new owners. Both had huge sums of public money invested in their long-term future. Buxton Town Hall has been ruled surplus to the local authority’s requirements, and the town’s Museum has been closed by the cash-strapped county council.

“Understanding how we got here is vital to seeking a way of progressing to the next step for Buxton,” he said.

“This book fills our heritage buildings with flesh and blood characters who were central to the shaping of the town’s most significant resident. It makes the case for saving that heritage, and for finally celebrating Vera Brittain, all the more urgent.”

Testament of Lost Youth: The Early Life and Loves of Vera Brittain by Kathryn Ecclestone, published by Pen and Sword.