Beauchamp with his sister Katherine Mansfield. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
Beauchamp with his sister Katherine Mansfield. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
On the afternoon of October 6, 1915, Leslie Beauchamp, a New Zealander in the British Army, gave a class in grenade throwing.
Trained in the perils of the bombs, Second Lieutenant Beauchamp had the weapon in his hands as he explained how to prime the device.
He was in a field in Flanders, and moved closer to a pond where he could safely toss the bomb.
He never made it. The grenade exploded, fatally wounding Beauchamp and his companion, 24-year-old Sergeant James Holden. Within the hour and despite medical attention, both men were dead.
The explosion that claimed Beauchamp has never really quietened. For the 21-year-old was the dearly loved brother of writer Katherine Mansfield. At the time he left for the front, the siblings had grown extremely close, and his death profoundly shook her. When a friend, Beatrice Campbell, asked Mansfield what happened to her brother, the author replied: "Blown to bits." In her diary the shattered Mansfield wrote: "I am just as much dead as he is."
This weekend, not far from the Belgian war cemetery that contains Beauchamp's headstone, scholars are gathering to discuss Mansfield, her brother and the long shadow of World War I.
Keynote speaker Dr Gerri Kimber, who chairs the Katherine Mansfield Society, told the Weekend Herald Beauchamp's death catapulted Mansfield into painful mourning. It was the wellspring for one of her stories, Prelude - the time before his birth in February 1894 - and the sequel At the Bay.
The pair shared a tender relationship, and wrote intimate letters.
One, which Beauchamp sent from Wellington in October 1913, began: "My beloved Katie, why do you write such beautiful letters? They bring to me all the fragrance of your being and atmosphere and fills me with a gigantic longing to press you to my heart, kissing your lips."
Before he left for the front in September 1915, Beauchamp had stayed with Mansfield in northwest London. His presence stirred feelings of her Wellington childhood. The young soldier so dreaded the moment when he had to pack up for the front that he could not bear the parting. He avoided her, and sent his sister a telegram saying "the good bye should have been too awful".
Leslie Beauchamp's grave at the Ploegsteert Wood military Cemetery, Belgium.
Photo / Derrick Bunn
"To my knowledge," Dr Kimber remarked, " he did not write such a telegram to anyone else."
The youngest of five siblings, and the only boy, "Chummie" Beauchamp - by all accounts a cheerful lad - joined an insurance company when he left school. In 1912 he signed on as a cadet with the territorials, and persuaded Harold, his father, that he should join the British Army. "Off at last!" he wrote to Katherine in December 1914. "Father gave in this morning."
A wealthy banker, Harold Beauchamp recalled in his memoirs that his son insisted on joining the cause: "Dad, I must go to the war, all my schoolmates are volunteering."
Father and son sailed together to Britain on the steamship Indrabarah, arriving in February 1915. joined the 8th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, a unit of Lord Kitchener's "New Army" of volunteers and completed an officer training course at Oxford's Balliol College. He learned about grenades on a six-day course at Clapham Common where he qualified as a bombardier.
Beauchamp met Mansfield at the Bank of New Zealand in London. She borrowed a sum from him, using the money on a risky trip to France to see a lover, Francis Carco. The infatuated Mansfield crossed the Channel to a restricted French war zone , travelling apparently as a sick aunt for a passionate few days with Carco in Gray, a Burgundy town by the Saone River.
Dr Kimber said the dangerous journey reflected Mansfield's bravery and recklessness.
"She could be quite quixotic. I don't think she gave a minute's thought to the danger - except in how to avoid detection and to get to him as quickly as possible."
Mansfield - who had male and female lovers - and her brother shared an androgynous nature. Dr Kimber says family members told her Beauchamp was gay, and would have had a hard time had he survived the war. "He would still no doubt have made a suitable marriage, as most gay men did at that time, to please the family."
At this weekend's symposium in Menen - a Flemish town known as Messines in the war - Dr Kimber intends to discuss letters she discovered on a research visit to New Zealand last month for a new Mansfield biography. She wants to reveal the "most complete picture of Beauchamp yet put together."
A senior lecturer at the University of Northampton and co-editor of the Katherine Mansfield Journal, Dr Kimber intends visiting his grave and the field where he died.
"It will be a poignant moment for me.
"I have held the little piece of moss that one of the officers sent to Mansfield after Beauchamp's death (it is now held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington) but to see the exact spot will be very moving."
