‘Not the kind to die’: Katherine Mansfield and the Unquiet Ghost of ‘little brother’

Summary

frater, ave atque vale

How will I survive without you, O brother?

I must go, O brother

I must die too, O brother

O brother, O brother

Some 98,950 New Zealanders donned uniform and served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) in the First World War, of whom more than 18,000 were killed. Data is elusive, however, about those who served but were not part of the NZEF. Government sources document 1,184 individuals who left on troopships to join units in Britain and another 3,370 ‘known to have left New Zealand and enlisted in British and Australian forces’. It has thus proven difficult to ascertain the number of New Zealanders who died while serving in these other forces, but Leslie Beauchamp, son of Harold Beauchamp, Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, and brother of Katherine Mansfield, was one of them. Leslie's famous sister was determined that he not be forgotten and that it was her sacred duty to write ‘a long elegy’ for him (CW4, p. 192). And Leslie can also represent those unheralded souls who had no gifted sister to articulate the pain felt on their passing. Thomas Cecil Higginson, Leslie's friend from Wellington College, was one such individual: he travelled with Leslie to England, took a commission in the Grenadier Guards, was killed during the Somme offensive on 14 September 1916, and is buried in the Thiepval Cemetery, France.

Leslie was the last child, and only boy, in a family of five children. He was born on 21 February 1894 in Nurse Pattrick's Private Hospital in Wellington, a fact that suggests some anxiety about his mother's health because his siblings were all born at home. A photograph of the Beauchamp family from around 1896 shows him as a sturdy child in a white smock standing between his father's knees. He also appears in a photograph from Karori School in 1898 along with his sisters; but he really began his education in 1900, at Miss Swainson's private school, 20 Fitzherbert Terrace, and shows up in the front row of a 1901 photograph. His sister Jeanne recalled their first day and Leslie's sensitivity: ‘We were shown into Miss Swainson's drawing room and asked to kneel on two hassocks. Prayers were said over us. Tears were coming from Chummie's eyes.’