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Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as "Chaucer” was born on the 3 August 1887 in Rugby.
He was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier.” He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England. Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks.
Virginia Woolf boasted to Vita Sackville-West of once going skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were in Cambridge together.
Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division's Antwerp expedition in October 1914. He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite.
He died at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin, moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the
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