English solider, poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon was BOTD in 1886. Born in Matfield, Kent, to a wealthy middle class family, he studied history at Cambridge University, where he began writing and publishing poetry. Motivated by patriotism, he joined the Army at the outbreak of World War One, and was sent to the Western Front, where he was horrified by the bloody realities of trench warfare. His near-suicidal feats of bravery, including the single-handed capture of a German trench, earned him the Distinguished Service Order. Traumatised by his own experiences and the death of his brother Hamo at Gallipoli, he disposed of his DSO medal in 1917 and published a statement critiquing Britain’s participation in the war, which was read out in Parliament. Threatened with a court-martial, his friends Robbie Ross and Robert Graves helped persuade the Army to declare Sassoon mentally ill. He was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, where he was treated for shell shock by the (discreetly gay) doctor W. H. R. Rivers. While at Craiglockhart, he befriended and fell in love with fellow patient Wilfred Owen, working on poetry together for the hospital’s literary journal. Devastated by Owen’s death in battle in 1918, just days before the Armistice, Sassoon helped edit and ensure the publication of Owen’s war poems. His own poems, published in The Old Huntsman and Counter-Attack, broke with the nostalgic tradition of war poetry personified by his contemporary Rupert Brooke, describing the suffering and death of trench warfare in graphic detail, offering a fierce critique of war and British imperialism. Sassoon’s and Owen’s work caught the mood of a shell-shocked post-war Britain, and became wildly popular. As the sole survivor of the group, Sassoon became a national celebrity and the toast of fashionable London society, befriending Edith Sitwell, Ottoline Morrell and T. E. Lawrence. Relatively openly gay for his time, he had a series of unhappy relationships with Beverley Nichols, Stephen Tennant and Ivor Novello. Despairing of the possibility of a happy life as a gay man, he married Hester Gatty in 1931, with whom he had a son. The marriage was unhappy, and they separated a decade later. After the war, he largely gave up writing poetry, though enjoyed commercial success with his memoirs Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, uncharacteristically jolly and nostalgic accounts of his upper-crust upbringing and war service. He became increasingly reclusive and misanthropic in old age, becoming estranged from his son, and converted to Catholicism at the end of his life. He died in 1967, aged 80. Amid many posthumous tributes, he was commemorated in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. His experiences at Craiglockhart and relationships with Rivers and Owen were fictionalised in Pat Barker’s Regeneration novel trilogy; a 1997 film adaptation of Regeneration starred James Wilby as Sassoon. More recently, he wa portrayed by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi in Terence Davies‘ 2021 biopic Benediction.