New book shines light on Rupert Brooke's true character

POET Rupert Brooke was potty-mouthed and told dirty jokes.

Rugby's famous literary son is remembered for writing some of the best known verse in the English language.

But a new biography paints a rather different picture of Brooke than the perceived idealised image of the handsome war poet with flowing golden hair.

Brooke was born in Hillmorton Road in 1887, the son of a housemaster at Rugby School, and was educated at two independent schools in Rugby - Hillbrow School and Rugby School - before going on to Cambridge University.

He had already established himself as a poet of note, having published his first collection of verse in 1911, before signing up to serve in the First World War.

He died aged 27 after developing sepsis from an infected mosquito bite while sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force en route to the landing in Gallipoli in 1915.

He left behind poems which were to cement his reputation, most notably The Soldier, with its iconic opening lines - "If I should die think only this of me; that there's some corner of a foreign field. That is forever England."

And Brooke's biographer Nigel Jones claims come the Second World War it was Winston Churchill who created the mythologised modern view of Brooke - "Britain's noble son" - to help recruit young men to join the war effort.

Mr Jones said Brooke should be remembered not as some golden Apollo but rather as a modern man.

He added: "Now I think we can look back at him shorn of illusion of this golden boy.

"He was very much a modern man who used four-letter words, a man whom told dirty jokes. He was a man of his time."

Mr Jones, who was speaking at a recent history festival in Wiltshire, also claimed Brooke was "sexually ambivalent, paranoiac, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and sometimes plain mad."

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