Dr W. H. R. Rivers: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves’ ‘fathering friend’

Dr William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922) was a pioneer in many of the emerging fields of science between 1880 and 1920. Yet he is known today, if at all, less for his outstanding scientific achievements than for his friendship with two of the greatest names among the First World War poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, whom he met at Craiglockhart Military Hospital in 1917. Rivers's mistake, according to Graves, who studied his work closely, 'lay in being genuinely first class in too many subjects and exciting jealousy by relating together too brilliantly the result of his researches in medicine, physiology, morbid psychology, social psychology, ethnology, magic, religion and other over-specialised departments of human knowledge'. Graves's words were written in response to two books by one of Rivers's most famous pupils, Bronislaw Malinowski who, less than 5 years after Rivers's premature death aged only 58, attacked the teacher he had so recently revered in two seminal works based on Malinowski's field-work in Melanesia, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1922) and Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926). No one could read these books, Graves argued, 'without concluding that Rivers was one of those theorists who lived in a "closed study" and never "ventured into the open air"'. Whereas, in fact, Rivers was one of the pioneers of anthropological fieldwork. Indeed it was Rivers himself who had introduced Malinowski to Melanesia when he invited him to join him on his second visit there in July 1914.

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