Sassoon archive on display for first time

The treasures of Siegfried Sassoon's personal archive, including his diary recounting the first day on the Somme, and the telegram summoning him to HQ after his 'Soldier's Declaration', have gone on public display for the first time. Dream Voices: Siegfried Sassoon, Memory and War , opens today at Cambridge University Library, after its £1.25m acquisition of the archive held by Sassoon's relatives. The purchase, which means Cambridge University Library now holds the world's pre-eminent Sassoon collection, was supported by Andrew Motion, Sebastian Faulks and Michael Morpurgo. Sassoon (1886-1967) is regarded as one of the leading poets of the First World War. His classic prose works Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer have made him the foremost British chronicler of the conflict. He is famous for his protest against the War in 1917 and his refusal to return to the fighting, and for the friendship he formed with fellow war poet Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. The archive includes Sassoon's trench journals, kept in the pockets of his Army uniform on the Western Front; further diaries covering the post-War years; poetry manuscripts, including corrected copies of his war poems; drafts and notes relating to his autobiographical prose trilogy; commonplace books, juvenilia and sporting notebooks; and letters to and from family and friends.