Forever England explores Rupert Brooke's life, from schooldays to the Great War, and in so doing builds a remarkable picture of a long-lost England and a generation's descent into war. Brooke's poems emerge dramatically from a tangled web of love, friendship, mental illness and politics. He reveals also the existence of a previously unrecorded love child from a South Seas romance.
The WW1 legend was largely brought about by the words of one of his sonnets: 'If I should die, think only this of me/That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.' The poem, and all that it represented, became the focal point of a nation's grief for its lost youth.
Asked why Brooke was special, his Commander-in-Chief answered, "Is it because he was a hero? There were thousands? Is it because he looked a hero? There were a few. Is it because he had genius? There were others. But Rupert Brooke held all these three gifts of the gods in his hands.
Forever England is written and narrated by Mike Read.
