Into Battle is a stage play written by Hugh Salmon, which received its premiere at the Greenwich Theatre in London in October 2021.
[1][2][3][4] The play tells the story of a bitter feud between the privileged Old Etonians at Balliol College, Oxford and a more socially aware group of non-Etonians during the run-up to the First World War.
Many of them, in their different ways, were religious.’ The play opens against the background of the January 1910 general election and focuses on three Etonians in the Annandale Society: Julian Grenfell, his younger brother Billy, and Patrick Shaw-Stewart all of whom despised other students who they referred to as 'plebs.'
His grandfather was the banker George Rae, a noted patron of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Rae abhorred the loutish behaviour of the Annandale Society, which included releasing rabbits in a closed quad in which a bulldog ravaged them to death, rampaging through the college dressed as cavemen and a particularly notorious incident where Billy Grenfell smashed up Keith Rae’s room and hurled his contents out of the window and into the Quad below.
Touchingly and by an extraordinary twist of fate, Keith Rae and Billy Grenfell fought alongside each other for the same regiment on the same day (30 July 1915) in the Battle of Hooge (Belgium).
[5] The case was finally closed when Salmon was awarded significant damages and Lintas made a formal apology.