The worst is yet to come

‘We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’ This is from the published diaries of Alfred Hermann Fried, an Austrian pacifist born 160 years ago. He is remembered for cofounding the German peace movement, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and championing the use of Esperanto.

Fried was born in Vienna into a Hungarian-Jewish family on 11 November 1864. He left school aged 15 and started to work in a bookshop. In 1883 he moved to Berlin, where he opened a printing press. It was there that Fried became a steadfast pacifist and befriended Bertha von Suttner. Together, in 1892, they launched the magazine, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) - which from 1899 became Die Friedenswarte (The Peacekeeper). He co-founded the German peace society, and became known for advocating ‘fundamental pacifism,’ peace as the ultimate solution. He wrote and published countless articles in his magazines calling for peace and harmony among nations.

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was a turning point in the development of Fried’s philosophy of pacifism. Thereafter, in his appeals to the German intellectual community, he placed more reliance on economic cooperation and political organisation among nations as bases for peace, and less upon limitation of armaments and schemes for international justice. ‘War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy’, he said. ‘If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.’

Fried was a prominent member of the Esperanto movement, and in 1903 published an Esperanto textbook. In 1909, he collaborated with Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine of the Central Office of International Associations in the preparation of the Annuaire de la Vie Internationale. In 1911 he received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Tobias Asser. At the outbreak of World War I, he moved to neutral Switzerland, and worked continuously for an end to the conflict. After the war, he returned to Austria to continue writing and advocating international peace. He died in 1921. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Nobel Prize website, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

During the war, Fried kept a diary, one which he later published in four volumes as Mein Kriegs-Tagebuch (My War Journal). The diary is available online at Internet Archive and, thanks to a ZIMD digitisation project, at this dedicated website. A short introduction at the latter states: ‘Bernhard Tuider [from the Austrian National Library], who wrote one of the few well-founded works about [Fried’s] war diaries, was fascinated by their power. 1,600 pages about the World War from a man who, as a journalist at the NZZ in neutral Switzerland, worked through up to 50 international newspapers every day. The war diaries are unique in their quality and can be counted as part of the heritage of the world culture of peace.’ However, as far as I can tell, the diary appears only to be available in the origial German.

In the diary, Fried documents his activities and those of colleagues in the peace movement; expresses dissatisfaction with the peace settlement; and details his journalistic campaign against the Versailles Treaty. As a whole, the diary served as a platform for Fried to argue that the war proved the validity of his pacifistic analysis of world politics. A more detailed look at Fried’s diary can be found in an article by Tuider. Moreover, a list of the original diaries is available at the online archive of California.

The following two extracts have been sourced from the digitised files and then translated by Google.

31 December 1915
‘The hopes for peace that were kindled by the article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung prove to be vain. The proposals are rejected by friend and foe alike. People’s minds are too clouded to be able to see that this is not about the terms of peace at all, but only the beginning of discussions. The tools of reason should only be put into use. That is the main thing.

On the other hand: England, England so proud of its freedoms, is introducing general conscription. This is a step backwards in culture for all, which we owe to this war. And a bad prospect. If England is only now beginning to prepare for a continental war, how long will it last?

In France, the Socialist Congress has passed a resolution in favor of continuing the war until a permanent legal peace is achieved. The resolution was adopted by an enormous majority of 2,736 votes to 76.

These are two events that do not mean peace, but war. The continuation of the war and increased bitterness, increased destruction. Hundreds of thousands of young men are to be sacrificed again. That is the meaning of these two events that conclude the war year of 1915.

Last year I raised the question here whether the terrible war would end on New Year’s Eve this year. ‘For those who can measure the magnitude of the shocks that these five months of war have already brought about, it may seem questionable whether New Year’s Eve 1915 will already descend upon a Europe liberated from war.’ - Questionable. And yet I concluded hopefully with a ‘perhaps.’ It is a solemn seriousness that, after the end of this bloody year, provides the answer to the questioning view of the previous year. And today one dares not look into the future of the new year with the same doubt. Everything that must come is terrible. The slaughter has lasted too long; Europe has been destroyed for too long. Our generation can no longer hope for peace. I conclude my notes for 1915 with a curse on the year that has passed away, on the year that has been stolen from us, with a curse on the insane arrangers of this war.’

31 December 1918
‘A year ago we stood before Brest-Litovsk. Today we stand before Versailles. Is it going to be the same? Is the Entente victors going to repeat the fraud of the German military, who then spoke of a peace without territorial cessions and compensation and then emphasized their ‘power position’ and forced the most shameful peace of conquest? Pichon recently spoke in the French Chamber of the annexation of the Saar region as compensation for the injustice committed against France in 1815. Will they ultimately want to restore the integrity of Troy? The failure of the English elections has strengthened Lloyd George’s power politics. All pacifists and politicians of reconciliation have been defeated. These are elections like the Hottentot elections in Germany in 1912. The new state of the Czechoslovaks was in no way different from Wilhelmine Germany in its early days. The areas of the German-Austrians and Magyars are still being occupied and Czechized. In ultra-German Reichenberg, where the town’s police wore spiked helmets in the Prussian style, the Czech language is being introduced as an official language. The Italians want to hold on to the German territories in Tyrol and are constantly coming into conflict with the South Slavs on the Adriatic. The peace that is about to be concluded and which was originally under the sign of the Wilson program threatens to become a new affirmation of the power principle. There is therefore a danger that it will not be peace again, only a period of truce, interspersed with seeds of conflict that will soon flourish under the expected regime of violence. Is it possible that after this terrible object lesson we are threatened with something like this, that the madness that we thought we had overcome has survived? It is clear that if this is to happen, the efforts of those who want to radically overcome the current situation, who believe that new life can only blossom from the total destruction of this society, will gain strength. The German militarists, in their delusion, were the pioneers and firing guard of Bolshevism. Should the military and the militarily minded politicians of the Entente blindly follow in the footsteps of their Prussian predecessors? - The victory of the principle of force in Versailles would mean the victory of the world revolution in its most radical form. Indeed, it would even leave no other hope that the unbearable pressure of the militarism that will still be maintained after this war will be removed. The people who have the decision to shape the coming peace agreement take on a great responsibility. It depends on them whether the institution of war is eliminated by a rational decision or whether its elimination is achieved through decades of terrible bloodbath in the civil war.

We stand at the turn of the year more hopeless and depressed than ever during these unfortunate four and a half years of the World War. In the past, we still saw the possibility of a favorable conclusion to the serious crisis for humanity; today, this glimmer of light is only tiny, barely perceptible. The war is only over in theory; it rages on in an even more terrible form than before. Let us not deceive ourselves; the worst is yet to come.’

Reality is unbearable

‘Reality is unbearable, because it is not fully experienced; it is not fully visible. It reaches us in fractions of events, snatches of accounts, echoes of gunfire - horrifying and impenetrable - in the clouds of dust, in fires, which as history says “reduced everything to ashes” although nobody really understands these words.’ This is Zofia Nałkowska, an influential Polish author born 140 years ago today, writing in her diary during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her diaries, which are said to have ‘stood the test of time to a greater extent than her novels’ were published in six volumes, but only in Polish.

Nałkowska was born on 10 November 1884 into a family of intellectuals in Warsaw. She went to a boarding school before entering the ‘Flying University’, a secret educational establishment aimed at teaching Polish scholarship (rather than the ruling Russian ideology). Aged 14, she made her debut as a poet in Przegląd Tygodniowy; thereafter publishing poems in other Warsaw magazines. In her 20s, having abandoned poetry, she began to contribute short fiction and articles to Echa Kieleckie, a weekly magazine  established thanks to the revival of political life in Poland.

In 1904, Nałkowska married the writer and publisher Leon Rygier, though they separated in 1909. Later, in 1922, she would marry Jan Jur-Gorzechowski, a soldier in the Polish Army, but this marriage, too broke down, in 1929. Her first literary literary success came in 1923 with Romans Teresy Hennert (The Romance of Teresa Hennert), and a slew of popular novels followed. For a while, she worked for the Polish government, in the Foreign Propaganda Bureau, but after returning to Warsaw in 1926 (having lived in Wołomin, Kielce) she ran a literary salon and travelled through Europe. In 1933 she joined the Przedmieście literary group. In 1935, she went to live with her mother, and during the German occupation, she ran a tobacco shop with her sister Hanna.

For years she was the vice-president of the Polish PEN Club; she was active in the Main Board of the Association of Polish Writers; and she was a member of the Legislative Sejm. In 1949 she was a delegate to the Congress of Defenders of Peace in Paris. In November 1949 she became a member of the National Committee for the Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s Birth. Granica - which would become her most famous work of the interwar period - earned her the State Literary Award in 1935. She died in 1954. Further information is available from Wikipedia and Culture.pl.

Nałkowska wrote a diary for nearly 60 years beginning with her early youth and continuing through to her death. These journal entries were collected into six volumes and published in Polish by Czytelnik. According to Culture.pl, her diaries show ‘she had a talent for observation and introspection as well as intellectual flourish and emotional depth.’ Moreover, ‘[the diaries] have stood the test of time to a greater extent than her novels’. The following extracts - translated into English - were sourced at Culture.pl, which also has more substantial information about the diaries.

1900
‘It is hard to believe to what extent happiness depends on money. . . Shortage surrounds me (. . .) There is something tasteless about poverty. It is such a sorrowful condition that one constantly wants to shake it off as if it was a sticky spider web. (. . .) I am writing at a table made of door laid on an old wooden washbasin and covered with a shabby time-worn bedspread. I [am] writing by light of a candle burning out in a candlestick greened with age. I can smell a wonderful bouquet of flowers placed in a preserve jar. Browned basket with Hanka’s stones, a very old dressing case from my aunt, a chewed penholder.’

1902
‘In as much as I lead a literary life, I write a real-life diary. There is no ‘fiction’ here. Whilst writing, I am always in a hurry to squeeze in as much as possible not to miss anything. I do not care about the form; I cram facts one after another leaving ponderings and effects aside. What I achieve in this way is a certain directness, certain freshness of life, which I highly appreciate.’

1913
‘I went to a fancy-dress party and two other balls and, in a sense, I bought myself out of melancholy. For a long time now I have known that it is a hygienic thing to immerse into a bathtub of foolishness and primitiveness. Yet, it is difficult for me then to close my eyelids completely. Through my eyelashes I can still see my distance from this cheerfulness, distance or even dysfunction.’

1914
‘I enjoy living. I am certain that if I wasn’t ill, I could say that I am happy. To observe the world from a hammock, balcony or various points in a forest. To think, think, think - beginning with early morning when I am so deathly exhausted and sleepy as if night did not exist at all, to the evening when looking in the mirror I can see that I am not young any more. The latter one is surly sad but not that important - as my curiosity about the world has remained unchanged; it’s an insatiable, burning curiosity.’

1915
‘My acquaintanceships have turned significantly licentious. Every single day there are visitors, groups of visitors I should say. However, I have always enjoyed looking at people - and even more so since I derive less pleasure from looking at myself.’

1 April 1942
‘It seems to me that I experience the irreversible and irretrievable passage of time stronger than others. Perhaps, the reason for it is my poor memory, who knows, if it hasn’t already started to weaken. The passage of my emotions and the passage of people who keep leaving and passing away, who leave nothing behind: this is the sole drive behind my writing. As always, I am not concerned with historical events, fate of entire nations, facts passing in the back motion - this is not what tempts me as others will deal with it in a much better way - but with the life as I have seen and experienced myself, that is totally doomed to failure. Not only am I someone in a boat drifting against the tide but as shores pass by, I am leaving myself behind. But the water itself, the essence of life motion, continues to pass out of my memory. Drifting, I keep leaving myself on those shores and at the same time I am sailing around myself. And I fail to achieve the goal of keeping records. I will never succeed, never be on time, never embrace, never accomplish, never remember everything. Pooh, it’s gone, it has evaporated, it’s lost for good. It sounds ridiculous that the most important of all my ‘worries’ is that everything will perish and be wasted, and I am the one to blame.’

28 April 1943
‘Reality is unbearable, because it is not fully experienced; it is not fully visible. It reaches us in fractions of events, snatches of accounts, echoes of gunfire - horrifying and impenetrable - in the clouds of dust, in fires, which as history says “reduced everything to ashes” although nobody really understands these words. This reality, both distant and happening next door, is bearable. What you cannot bear are your thoughts.’

29 April 1943
‘Solemn marches of the resigned, jumps into the flames, leaps into the dark. (. . .) I have lived next to it, I can live! But finally I feel bad, finally I have been changing into someone else. How can I be forced to it, to be inside it, to accept it while staying alive! It is not only a torture but also a disgrace. It is a terrible shame, not only compassion. One feels guilty for making any efforts to survive, not to go insane, or somehow retain yourself in this terror.’

14 December 1943
‘It has still continued, it has repeated over and over again - similar days go by: raids and then executions in the city streets. Or there - this I know. I think that I will be myself at that time, that I will never stop being myself. I think of it as if it was a discovery. When I walk where I don’t want to, when I am forced to leave my makeshift bed, my books and my letter files behind, and to do what seems so difficult when one is still surrounded by them - till the very last moment, however, I will be left with myself, who will be with me. And in this sense, I will remain myself. Because what is really important in the final moments are the morale and the peace that I am so certain of, as well as a total restraint of despair – because there will be no fear. Fear will be turned around; frozen; fear will be exactly that: resilience and strength. I can achieve it all if I am still myself. - That’s what I believe and that’s how I settle my own matters. Yet, it does not settle the matters of the others: those young ones whose lives are unfulfilled.

1 September 1946
‘I look like the old woman that I am. And realizing that old age is a shame, a disability; that an old age disqualifies; and keeping up appearances, a hairdo, a face “made-up” in spite of anything, neat clothes make it worse, make it the more visible. That’s it.’

Professor of poetry

Francis Turner Palgrave, a close friend of Alfred Tennyson and a connoisseur of English poetry, was born two centuries ago today. He worked most of his life as a civil servant in the education service but in his 60s was elected Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry. Soon after Palgrave’s death, his daughter, Gwenllian, published a book about her father’s life in which she quotes extensively from diaries he kept intermittently for over 50 years.

Palgrave was born on 28 September 1824 in Great Yarmouth, the eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, an historian, and his wife Elizabeth Turner, daughter of a banker. He grew up in Yarmouth and also in Hampstead, London, but was largely educated at home, in an atmosphere of ‘high artistic culture’, ‘fervid anglo-catholicism’ and ‘strenuous thought’, until the age of 14, when his father could afford to sent him to Charterhouse public school as a day boy.

After travelling on the Continent, Palgrave won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford; but, in 1846, he interrupted his studies for a year or so to serve as assistant private secretary to William Gladstone. From 1847 to 1862, he was fellow of Exeter College. In 1849, he took up a civil service post in the education department, which led him, from 1850 to 1855, to be vice-principal at Kneller Hall, a government training college for elementary teachers at Twickenham. There, he met Alfred Tennyson. When the training college was abandoned, Palgrave returned to Whitehall in 1855, becoming examiner in the education department, and eventually assistant secretary.

Palgrave married Cecil Grenville Milnes in 1862, and they had one son and four daughters. Apart from Tennyson and Gladstone, Palgrave was friends with other notables of the time, including Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. He wrote and published poetry, in volumes such as Visons of England. However, his principal claim to fame was to publish the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), a comprehensive and carefully chosen (in consultation with Tennyson) anthology of the best poetry in the language. This tome is considered to have helped popularise the poetry of William Wordsworth, and to have had a significant influence on poetic taste for several generations.

In 1884, Palgrave resigned his civil service position, and, the following year, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. By then, his life was mostly divided between London and Lyme Regis where he had bought a holiday home in 1872, with almost annual visits to Italy. He died in London in 1897. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Dictionary of National Biography (source of the quotes above) or The Twickenham Museum website.

Palgrave kept a journal for much of his life, and although this has not been published separately, Palgrave’s daughter, Gwenllian, included many extracts in her biography: Francis Turner Palgrave - His Journals and Memories of his Life. This was published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1899. It is freely available at Internet Archive. According to Gwenllian, her father started keeping a journal, intermittently, as early as 1834, in the form of letters to his mother. His last journal entry was in 1890. Here are a few extracts from Palgrave’s diary, as culled from Gwenllian’s biography,

31 March 1849 [Palgrave’s first meeting with Tennyson]
‘In the evening to Mr. Brookfield’s. Found there Lingen, A. Tennyson; afterwards Thackeray and H. Hallam came. Walked towards Hampstead with A. Tennyson. Conversed on Universities, the ‘Princess,’ his plans, &c.; he very open and friendly: a noble, solid mind, bearing the look of one who had suffered greatly: - strength and sensitiveness blended.’

2 April 1849
‘In the afternoon to A. Tennyson’s in the Hampstead Road. Long conversation with him; he read me songs to be inserted in the ‘Princess,’ and poems on A. Hallam, some exquisite.’

July 1870
‘On the 14th of July we welcomed another little boy. After eight or nine days this little darling began to pine, and my dear Cis wishing to have him baptised, he received the names Arthur Frederick, the second after Freddy Cavendish, who promised to be godfather. The baby looked at us with deep violet eyes, as if asking to live. I could not realise fear, though his dear mother had begun to realise she must resign her treasure. But in the afternoon of the 31st, as this sweet patient little Arthur lay on Cecil’s lap, every hope was clearly over. . . . We buried him in the quiet country ground at Barnes, where Cecil’s Aunt Sidney lies.’

23 November 1870
‘The war still, but with more than one difference. In so great and complex an action and where so much human feeling is mixed, a cause cannot remain true to itself: initial right and justice are insufficient to leaven the vast mass of after events. It seems clear that the French will die as a nation, sooner than make a surrender of defeat.’

29 May 1871
‘All to Stokesay Castle, a singularly perfect specimen of domestic residence temp. Edward I. The site of this small ancient relic, lovely amid green wooded hills and mountainesque horizon - indebted much to the haze of an exquisite summer day. Thence to Ludlow: the castle here of all dates, is as fine as that uncomfortable thing, a ruin, ever can be.’

21 July 1871
‘Came to Lyme. In the evenings I am reading to Cis the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’: this seems to me to stand above all other novels, like a play by Shakespeare above all other plays. Indeed, in astonishing truthfulness and variety in creation of character, in power and pathos, I cannot see how this, at least, is inferior to Shakespeare . . . We have spent four agreeable days at the Palace at Exeter: I had one long walk with the Bishop, and a really good discussion on Darwin and cognate topics. He was at his best on such points: large and wise and liberal . . . After that a brief visit to Whitestaunton, a charming house of early Elizabethan date; we much regretted the brevity of our visit, having greatly liked our hosts.’

20 October 1871
‘We came to Lyme, and Cis and I went carefully over our little intended purchase, Little Park. It is a pretty little old place, with its many little rooms and pretty garden and lovely views. May it be a true haunt of peace to us and our dear ones! . . . Returned home to a warm welcome from our dear, dear lively little ones.’

4 July 1874
‘We went to Chichester, taking little Cecy and Frank. A year has much shaken the good old Dean, but when pretty well there was all his old charm and life. He is about the best type of a former age that I know, or, rather, he has the best of the last age joined with our modern movement.’

23 July 1879
‘Cis and I took the two eldest children to ‘Hamlet.’ I had not seen any serious acting for years, and went expecting to find my greatest pleasure in the dear children’s; but I returned very deeply impressed with the frequent admirable renderings of Irving as ‘Hamlet’ and Miss Terry as ‘Ophelia.’ . . . Above all, the amazing difficulty of the art impressed me; as with painting, I doubt how far the spectator can pretend to point out the way in which parts might be improved, though he may lawfully feel not satisfied. What was good also, both in these and in the other actors, is to me so much clearly gained. Also if ‘Hamlet’ acted unequally, how unequally, a vrai dire, is ‘Hamlet’ written!’

17 July 1883
‘We took the children to ‘The Merchant of Venice’ for the second time. Irving’s Shylock seemed to me a fine and true rendering of Shakespeare’s intention - viz. the mediaeval Jew a little raised in dignity and humanity. The Terry Portia was generally admirable. This play gains, certainly, immensely by representation . . , the sort of tradition which gives Shylock the protagonist, if not the hero part, is amply justified. . . I certainly think that those who cannot see that Irving gave a very powerful, and Miss Terry a very beautiful, interpretation, and that the piece as a whole was a thoroughly ‘adequate’ representation of what Shakespeare meant, must never expect to be satisfied by human art.’

7 April 1885 [Naples]
‘The Pompeian frescoes and mosaics are much beyond what I expected in quality of Art: the invention is so copious, the handling so absolutely assured, that I fully felt the sad lesson how Art (despite a few reactions) has had one long downward career for two thousand years.’

2 October 1886 [Dorchester]
‘Walked with Frank through twilight to Winterbourne Came: a pretty little thatched house among trees. I was allowed to go up to the great aged poet in the bedroom which - at eighty-four and with now failing bodily strength - he is not likely to quit. Mr. [William] Barnes had invited me when Frank visited him last Christmas, and truly glad was I, and honoured did I feel, to accomplish it. A very finely cut face, expressive blue eyes, a long white beard, hands fine like a girl’s - all was the absolute ideal of a true poet. Few in our time equal him in variety and novelty of motive: in quantity of true sweet inspiration and musical verse. None have surpassed him in exquisite wholeness and unity of execution. He was dressed in red with white fur of some sort, and a darker red cap: Titian or Tintoret had no nobler, no more high born looking sitter among the doges of Venice. His welcome was equally cordial and simple; and, despite his bodily weakness, the soul, bright and energetic, seemed equally ready for death or for life. He talked of his visit to Tennyson; of his own work, saying he had taken Homer, and him only, as his model in aiming at choosing the one proper epithet when describing: also his love for the old pure English. I shall remember this most interesting half-hour all my life, and my dear Frank, I trust, will remember it many years beyond me.’

26 November 1885
‘Ince telegraphed that, I was elected Professor of Poetry by a majority of sixty. The pleasure this gave at home, and the many kind letters called forth from friends, have been the really agreeable elements in this success. It will be difficult to satisfy expectations - to face the illustrious images of ancestors in the Chair. But I am glad of a chance to be a little useful before the night cometh, if I may be so allowed.’

3 February 1887
‘A very pleasant visit to Browning. He was very affectionate and open, and told much of his earlier days. I was sorry to hear that he had lately been clearing his papers, and had burnt letters which, while his parents lived, he had written to them by way of minute daily journal from Russia, Italy, and England.’

10 February 1887
‘My dear eldest girl was married to James Duncan. Amongst the many friends who came to the house were Browning and Matt Arnold, who were among those signing the marriage register. . .’

27 February 1890
‘With dearest Cis to Oxford. Saw Jowett and Lyttelton Gell, and were received by the Rector of Exeter with his usual friendliness.’

‘My father’s journal,’ Gwenllian writes, ‘now breaks off with a pathetic abruptness; the last entry (February 27, 1890) being exactly a month before my mother’s death. From that time he altogether discontinued keeping a Journal. It is impossible to write of the effect which so near and sacred a sorrow had upon him. Such was the depth and the intensity of his feeling and reverence towards her, that even in her lifetime he only spoke of her - or of her opinions and judgment - with a kind of bated breath, as though she were too far above him to be mentioned in an ordinary way. During the remaining years of his life, few days passed without his recalling to his children some memory of her unselfishness, her humility, or her beautiful simplicity. For the first few months after her death this sorrow absolutely crushed him, and his friends, seeing him, feared that he would never recover any interest or happiness in life. But his own perfect selflessness - for with him it was always something more than unselfishness - enabled him to gather up the threads of life again for the sake of his children with a courage and loving tenderness which were inexpressibly touching. Many observed that his devotion to his children, strong and intense as it had always been, grew as these years passed, not only deeper, but also in many senses like that of a mother’s. He never conceived a plan, nor undertook anything, even for his own comfort or pleasure, without first thinking whether it would be for their happiness.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2024.

Autobiographical items

Dannie Abse, the Welsh doctor, poet and occasional diarist, died ten years ago today, just two days before I got married (though I’d known my new wife, Hat, for seven years, and we have two children together). I never met Abse, but there are one or two rather amazing links between him, Hat and I. He was best mates with my father, Frederic, in the 1950s, before Frederic abandoned me and my mother to emigrate to the US. Decades later, long before I met Hat, Abse was friends with her father, Giles Gordon. Indeed, both our fathers, (Hat’s and mine) are mentioned in Abse’s first published book of ‘journals’ - journals, for him, being a collection of ‘autobiographical items’. In later life, Abse lived in the same road as my mother, and they would walk their dogs in Childs Hill Park, and nod ‘hello’, in some faint acknowledgement of their social connection half a century earlier.

Abse was born in Cardiff, youngest of four children in a Jewish family. His father part-owned and ran cinemas. He studied medicine, briefly at the University of Wales, and then, in London, at Westminster Hospital and King’s College, becoming a specialist chest physician. During the latter part of the war he volunteered with other medical students to help, but was not sent abroad. He published his first book of poetry in the late 1940s, and in 1951, he was called up for National Service. That same year, he married Joan Mercer, a librarian at the time for the Financial Times, and an art historian. They moved to live in Hodford Road, Golder’s Green, north London, and had three children.

By this time, Abse was part of the London poetry scene, giving poetry readings, and being likened to his fellow Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, though he soon brushed off the latter’s overwrought style. A second collection of poems followed, and then his first autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (1954) brought him some early literary success. Many other poems, readings, books followed, as he managed to live life as a celebrated poet at the same time as pursuing a medical career.

In 2005, Joan was killed in a car accident, and Abse himself suffered injuries. He continued to write, and, in 2012, he accepted a CBE for services to poetry and literature, saying, at the time, that many people more left-wing than he had taken the award. He died on 28 September 2014. Wikipedia has a short biography, but there are also several detailed obituaries online, at The Telegraph, for example, The Guardian, the BBC. There are several older articles by Gerald Isaaman, ex editor of the Ham and High, for Camden New Journal.

My mother, Barbara, who died in 2007, also lived on Hodford Road, and would often see Abse in Childs Hill Park as they walked their dogs. I don’t think they ever talked, but they would nod a greeting as they passed, in some vague way acknowledging that they had known each other in the 1950s. Indeed, according to my father, Frederic Goldsmith, Dannie was one of his best friends in those days. They were both part of a group of musicians, artists, writers, German refugees (Frederic had arrived in London as a child in the 30s, his family escaping from Hitler’s Nazi Germany) that would meet in The Cosmo, on Finchley Road. Also part of that group was Peter the Girl, who was a friend of my parents; Uncle Bondy, who took us on holiday to his primitive villa in Bandol, France, at least once; and Peter Vansittart who married my aunt, Johnnie.

Around the time Abse was getting married, Frederic met my mother, and I was born the following year. The marriage between my parents didn’t last long - in contrast to Abse’s which lasted a lifetime and very happily so, according to all reports. Frederic, the cad, ran off to the US, not to return for 20 years. And when he did return to London, he thought it would be funny, in an ‘old times’ sort of way, to show up at Abse’s house in the middle of the night. But Abse didn’t find it funny, and, effectively, rejected his old friend. Peter the Girl, out of loyalty to Frederic, never forgave Abse for that - indeed she called me the day after he died to remind me of the story. Ironically, I was out of the country when Frederic made that visit to London - ironic because every year through my childhood he had written to me saying he would come visit soon!

Fast forwarding, to the year 2007, Frederic long since dead, and my mother just gone too, I met and fell in love with Harriet Gordon (often known as Hat). Her parents, too, had died in recent years: Giles Gordon, literary agent, and Margaret Gordon, children’s book illustrator. It turned out that her father had been Dannie Abse’s agent, and friend, for many years. Hat and I moved in together, and have two children now. Along the way, we wrote to Abse, thinking he might be intrigued by the coincidence. He wrote back, saying that is one ‘helluva coincidence’, or rather ‘a heaven of a coincidence.’

I feel justified in contributing a piece on Abse here, to The Diary Review, because he published several books which were either compilations of diary extracts and/or were given the title ‘journals’. In fact, in his first collection of ‘journal’ pieces - Journals from the Ant-Heap (1986) - Abse mentions both my father and Hat’s father, but in very different contexts. The so-called journal entries, though, had been written to order, on Gerald Isaaman’s suggestion for a column in the Ham and High (see below), and are only dated by month. Similar kinds of later autobiographical notes were put together with Journals from the Ant-Heap in a single volume called Intermittent Journals.

Here is Abse’s explanation of how he came to publish Journals from the Ant-Heap.

‘Gerald Isaaman, the editor of a local newspaper in London, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, affectionately known as the Ham and High, is a great admirer of George Orwell. In December 1983, recalling Orwell’s once lively column for Tribune entitled ‘As I Please’, he decided that, during 1984, he would like a similar series to grace the pages of the Ham and High.

George Orwell, alas, was not available. So he cast around other writers, shortlisting a number of them, no doubt alphabetically, for soon he telephoned me. I could not mimic Orwell. I could only write my own kind of prose. Gerald did not seem to mind and I agreed to offer him a fortnightly autobiographical column for one year only. He was to call my non-Orwellian ‘As I Please’ ‘ABSE’s 1984’. He proved to be an ideal editor. He only occasionally made suggestions and never changed my copy.

In March 1985 it was suggested to me that I protract my journal so that it could be published in book form. I could continue writing it, of course, as I pleased, and more importantly, when I pleased. I cannot pretend that I have not enjoyed conjugating occasional autobiographical items while I have been based in London or in South Wales. And I hope they will amuse like-minded readers. They are not private diary entries but were written, as all journalism is, as a public secret.’

Abse dedicated Journals from the Ant-Heap ‘To Margaret and Giles Gordon’ (Hat’s parents); and here is one extract from the book, in which Abse reflects on the Cosmo days, and mentions Frederic/Fred, my father - approximately 20 years before Hat and I were to meet.

March-April 1986
‘We decided to dine out to celebrate the arrival of an advance copy of my new book of poems, As the Bloody Horse. We chose to eat at The Cosmo in Swiss Cottage. Joan and I had not visited that Viennese café for years but suddenly, in nostalgic mood, we wanted to make a return journey to 1949. In the post-war years, when I was a medical student, instead of studying in my ‘digs’ in Aberdare Gardens, NW6, [. . .] I often spent an evening gossiping and arguing with other Cosmo habitués.

Because of the refugees who had come to live in small rooms scattered across Swiss Cottage, this area had become a corner of Vienna with a distinct café life. Soon, young British writers, artists, musicians and burglars, joined the refugees and found the party-going, cigarette-smoking laden atmosphere of The Cosmo congenial. Generally Joan - then Joan Mercer - and I sat in the annexe over one cup of coffee all night but there were occasions when the annexe was too full and its occupants overflowed into the large main restaurant where they had laid white linen table-cloths over the tables in order to encourage their clientele to eat something!

It was to the main restaurant that we now repaired. It had hardly changed. There was something old-fashioned about the place, something outmoded, as if the clock had stopped not so much in 1949 but in pre-war Vienna. [. . .] It was odd to gaze around the restaurant and observe not one person known to us. Where were the novelists, youthful once more, Peter Brent, Bernice Rubens, Peter Vansittart? Where the sculptor, Bill Turnbull? Would not Emanuel Litvonoff, Cherry Marshall and Rudi Nassauer come in at any minute? Was Ivor M in jail again? Were Keith Sawbridge, Fred Goldsmith and Old Bondy next door in the annexe arguing the toss? I recalled Jack Ashman, somewhat manic, and Theodore Bikel with his guitar - and the prettier faces of Penny, Noa, Betty, Jacky, Peter the Girl, Nina Shelley. I looked out of the window. Across the road where once had stood the elegant facades of fire-blitzed houses reigned instead W. H. Smith and MacDonalds.

Soon Joan and I were talking about the most remarkable ghost of The Cosmo, Elias Canetti. Canetti, some twenty years older than us, used to insist we called him Canetti, not Elias, since he did not care for his first name.  [. . .] Canetti would sit in The Cosmo regularly, often with pen in hand. When questioned on what he was writing he made it clear that it was a masterpiece. He had been working, he told us, on a book about Crowds and Power for more than a decade. When asked when he would publish it he quite seriously commented that there was plenty of time, that he did not wish to make the mistake Freud had done - contradict himself. ‘I have to be sure,’ he would say passionately. If ever a man believed he would one day receive the Nobel Prize for Literature that man was Elias Canetti. And he was right.’

After Joan’s death, Abse’s output was, understandably, focused on his grief. Apart from poems, he also published a diary - The Presence (Hutchinson, 2007) - he had kept in the year after the tragedy, and this turned out to be more of a bona-fide kind of diary, kept day-by-day, than anything he had published hitherto. The blurb describes it as ‘both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years’. ‘It is an extraordinary document,’ the publisher says, ‘painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.’ Here are a few lines from the first extract.

22 September 2005
‘The past survives however much one tries to drive it down and away from one’s consciousness. It rears up provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even. It is inescapable. But I think how I must count my blessings, though it would have been better if Joan not I had been the one who had crawled out of that capsized car. She would have been much more self-sufficient. Count your blessings, son, my mother used to say. A cliché. At times of stress, clichés, family sayings, proverbs, are drawn to the mind like a magnet. I do count my blessings: at night, though I don’t sleep well, I am unable to lie on my right side now that the stress-fractures of the right thoracic cage have healed; the scar on my chin and neck are hardly visible; my left thumb, though oddly angled, is less troublesome and it is no bad thing that I’ve lost a stone in weight. Presumably the latter is due as much to my increased metabolic rate as it is to the lack of Joan’s tempting and nutritious cooking. At least I hope I haven’t developed an over-active thyroid. I take my pulse and note it is raised though not alarmingly so. Do I write all this down as an aide-mémoire for my future self?’

Finally, I turn to my own diaries and find but one significant mention of Abse - yet another synchronous connection.

30 May 1977
‘Who is Dannie Abse? Yesterday evening my mother showed me a book of his poems, an old friend  of Frederic, I was told, before I was born. A poem ‘Epithalamium’ was pointed out - ‘Today I married my white lady in a barley field’. This evening I walk in to Pentameters because I have nothing else to do. Astonishingly, the man himself is reading tonight. I am anxious to meet him.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2014.

Lafcadio Hearn in Japan

‘Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too, one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, massed in ranks about five hundred deep.’ This is Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born Anglo-Irish writer, who died 120 years ago today, writing in a diary he kept while working as a teacher in Japan. Indeed, having emigrated from the US, he became very well-known for writing many books about Japan. Even in his diary entries, he seems fascinated by the traditions and culture of the Japanese people, and in the Oriental minds of his young pupils.

Hearn was born on the island of Lefkada (after which he was named), Greece, in 1850, the son of an Anglo-Irish surgeon-major in the British army and a Greek mother. His parents had a troubled relationship, which soon led to divorce. Neither parent was interested in Lafcadio, and he was brought up by another disinterested relative in Dublin. Nevertheless, he received a decent education, partly in France, partly in Durham, until his guardians went bankrupt. Aged 16, he suffered an injury to his left eye which left him partially blind and shy about his appearance.

In 1869, when his guardians had recovered some financial stability, they paid for Hearn to travel to the US, to Cincinnati, Ohio, to stay with relatives. However, these relatives gave him little assistance, and, for a while, he took menial jobs to survive. With a talent for writing, he gained a reporter’s job on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer in 1872, and soon developed a reputation for his journalistic audacity and for sensational articles about murders. In 1874, he and a friend set up a weekly journal of culture and satire, Ye Giglampz. That same year he married Alethea (Mattie) Foley, an African-American woman, but the marriage violated Ohio law, and, in response to religious lobbying, he was fired from his job. He went to work for the rival newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial.

Tired of the city, and divorced from Foley, Hearn moved to New Orleans in 1877, where he lived for a decade, writing for, and editing city newspapers. He wrote many articles for national magazines (such as Harper’s Weekly), and books about the city, and is credited with helping create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a distinct culture more akin to that of Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. He also translated French authors into English.

In 1887, Hearn accepted an invitation from Harper’s to become a West Indies correspondent, and he lived in Martinique for two years. After that, though, he decided to go to Japan. Upon his arrival in Yokohama in the spring of 1890, he was befriended by Basil Hall Chamberlain of Tokyo Imperial University, and officials at the Ministry of Education. At their encouragement, he moved to Matsue, to teach English at Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School. There he moved in distinguished circles, and later married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family. He had the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo.

Hearn stayed over a year in Matsue, moving on to another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, for a further three years. In 1894, he secured a journalism position with the English-language Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial) University, a post he held until 1903, and at Waseda University. He died on 26 September 1904, having written and published many books on Japan - a full bibliography can be found on Steve Tussel’s Lafcadio Hearn site. Further biographical information on Hearn can be found at Wikipedia, the magazine Humanities, or The Japan Times.

Among his many different kinds of books, Hearn left behind a couple of diaries, neither covering more than a short period: one written in Florida in 1887, and the other written just after taking up his first teaching post in Japan. Both these are freely available at Internet Archive. The first published was From the Diary of an English Teacher included in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Volume II) published by Houghton Mifflin and Company (Boston and New York) in 1894. Later the diary was re-published in other Lafcadio Hearn volumes, such as Diaries and Letters, in English and Japanese, translated and annotated by R. Tanabe. Posthumously, in 1911, Houghton Mifflin published Hearn’s Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist, which includes a diary called Floridian Reveries.

Here are several extracts from Hearn’s Japanese diary.

15 October 1890
‘To-day I witnessed the annual athletic contests of all the schools in Shimane Ken. These games were celebrated in the broad castle grounds of Ninomaru. Yesterday a circular race-track had been staked off, hurdles erected for leaping, thousands of wooden seats prepared for invited or privileged spectators, and a grand lodge built for the Governor, all before sunset. The place looked like a vast circus, with its tiers of plank seats rising one above the other, and the Governor’s lodge magnificent with wreaths and flags. School children from all the villages and towns within twenty-five miles had arrived in surprising multitude. Nearly six thousand boys and girls were entered to take part in the contests. Their parents and relatives and teachers made an imposing assembly upon the benches and within the gates. And on the ramparts over-looking the huge enclosure a much larger crowd had gathered, representing perhaps one third of the population of the city.

The signal to begin or to end a contest was a pistol-shot. Four different kinds of games were performed in different parts of the grounds at the same time, as there was room enough for an army; and prizes were awarded for the winners of each contest by the hand of the Governor himself.

There were races between the best runners in each class of the different schools; and the best runner of all proved to be Sakane, of our own fifth class, who came in first by nearly forty yards without seeming even to make an effort. He is our champion athlete, and as good as he is strong, so that it made me very happy to see him with his arm full of prize books. He won also a fencing contest decided by the breaking of a little earthenware saucer tied to the left arm of each combatant. And he also won a leaping match between our older boys.

But many hundreds of other winners there were too, and many hundreds of prizes were given away. There were races in which the runners were tied together in pairs, the left leg of one to the right leg of the other. There were equally funny races, the winning of which depended on the runner’s ability not only to run, but to crawl, to climb, to vault, and to jump alternately. There were races also for the little girls, pretty as butterflies they seemed in their sky-blue hakama and many-coloured robes, races in which the contestants had each to pick up as they ran three balls of three different colours out of a number scattered over the turf. Besides this, the little girls had what is called a flag-race, and a contest with battledores and shuttlecocks.

Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too, one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, massed in ranks about five hundred deep; six thousand pairs of arms rising and falling exactly together; six thousand pairs of sandalled feet advancing or retreating together, at the signal of the masters of gymnastics, directing all from the tops of various little wooden towers; six thousand voices chanting at once the “one, two, three,” of the dumb-bell drill: “Ichi, ni, - san, shi, - go roku, - shichi, hachi.”

Last came the curious game called “Taking the Castle.” Two models of Japanese towers, about fifteen feet high, made with paper stretched over a framework of bamboo, were set up, one at each end of the field. Inside the castles an inflammable liquid had been placed in open vessels, so that if the vessels were overturned the whole fabric would take fire. The boys, divided into two parties, bombarded the castles with wooden balls, which passed easily through the paper walls; and in a short time both models were making a glorious blaze. Of course the party whose castle was the first to blaze lost the game.

The games began at eight o’clock in the morning, and at five in the evening came to an end. Then at a signal fully ten thousand voices pealed out the superb national anthem “Kimi ga yo,” and concluded it with three cheers for their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

The Japanese do not shout or roar as we do when we cheer. They chant. Each long cry is like the opening tone of an immense musical chorus: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!’

3 November 1890
‘To-day is the birthday of His Majesty the Emperor. It is a public holiday throughout Japan; and there will be no teaching this morning. But at eight o’clock all the students and instructors enter the great assembly hall of the Jinjo Chugakko to honour the anniversary of His Majesty’s august birth.

On the platform of the assembly hall a table, covered with dark silk, has been placed and upon this table the portraits of Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and the Empress of Japan, stand side by side upright, framed in gold. The alcove above the platform has been decorated with flags and wreaths.

Presently the Governor enters, looking like a French general in his gold-embroidered uniform of office, and followed by the Mayor of the city, the Chief Military Officer, the Chief of Police, and all the officials of the provincial government. These take their places in silence to left and right of the platform. Then the school organ suddenly rolls out the slow, solemn, beautiful national anthem; and all present chant those ancient syllables, made sacred by the reverential love of a century of generations [. . .]

The anthem ceases. The Governor advances with a slow dignified step from the right side of the apartment to the centre of the open space before the platform and the portraits of Their Majesties, turns his face to them, and bows profoundly. Then he takes three steps forward toward the platform, and halts, and bows again. Then he takes three more steps forward, and bows still more profoundly. Then he retires, walking backward six steps, and bows once more. Then he returns to his place.

After this the teachers, by parties of six, perform the same beautiful ceremony. When all have saluted the portrait of His Imperial Majesty, the Governor ascends the platform and makes a few eloquent remarks to the students about their duty to their Emperor, to their country, and to their teachers. Then the anthem is sung again; and all disperse to amuse themselves for the rest of the day.’

4 April 1891
‘The Students of the third, fourth, and fifth year classes write for me once a week brief English compositions upon easy themes which I select for them. As a rule the themes are Japanese. Considering the immense difficulty of the English language to Japanese students, the ability of some of my boys to express their thoughts in it is astonishing. Their compositions have also another interest for me as revelations, not of individual character, but of national sentiment, or of aggregate sentiment of some sort or other. What seems to me most surprising in the compositions of the average Japanese student is that they have no personal cachet at all. Even the handwriting of twenty English compositions will be found to have a curious family resemblance; and striking exceptions are too few to affect the rule. Here is one of the best compositions on my table, by a student at the head of his class. Only a few idiomatic errors have been corrected:

“THE MOON

The Moon appears melancholy to those who are sad, and joyous to those who are happy. The Moon makes memories of home come to those who travel, and creates home-sickness. So when the Emperor Godaigo, having been banished to Oki by the traitor Hojo, beheld the moonlight upon the seashore, he cried out, ‘The Moon is heartless!’

The sight of the Moon makes an immeasurable feeling in our hearts when we look up at it through the clear air of a beauteous night.

Our hearts ought to be pure and calm like the light of the Moon.

Poets often compare the Moon to a Japanese mirror and indeed its shape is the same when it is full.

The refined man amuses himself with the Moon. He seeks some house looking out upon water, to watch the Moon, and to make verses about it.

The best places from which to see the Moon are Tsukigashi, and the mountain Obasute.

The light of the Moon shines alike upon foul and pure, upon high and low. That beautiful Lamp is neither yours nor mine, but everybody’s.

When we look at the Moon we should remember that its waxing and its waning are the signs of the truth that the culmination of all things is likewise the beginning of their decline.”

Any person totally unfamiliar with Japanese educational methods might presume that the foregoing composition shows some original power of thought and imagination. But this is not the case. I found the same thoughts and comparisons in thirty other compositions upon the same subject. Indeed, the compositions of any number of middle-school students upon the same subject are certain to be very much alike in idea and sentiment - though they are none the less charming for that. As a rule the Japanese student shows little originality in the line of imagination. His imagination was made for him long centuries ago - partly in China, partly in his native land. From his childhood he is trained to see and to feel Nature exactly in the manner of those wondrous artists who, with a few swift brush-strokes, fling down upon a sheet of paper the colour-sensation of a chilly dawn, a fervid noon, an autumn evening.

Through all his boyhood he is taught to commit to memory the most beautiful thoughts and comparisons to be found in his ancient native literature. Every boy has thus learned that the vision of Fuji against the blue resembles a white half-opened fan, hanging inverted in the sky. Every boy knows that cherry-trees in full blossom look as if the most delicate of flushed summer clouds were caught in their branches. Every boy knows the comparison between the falling of certain leaves on snow and the casting down of texts upon a sheet of white paper with a brush. Every boy and girl knows the verses comparing the print of cat’s-feet on snow to plum-flowers, and that comparing the impression of bokkuri on snow to the Japanese character for the number “two,” These were thoughts of old, old poets; and it would be very hard to invent prettier ones. Artistic power in composition is chiefly shown by the correct memorising and clever combination of these old thoughts.

And the students have been equally well trained to discover a moral in almost everything, animate or inanimate.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 September 2014.

His eye became dull

‘This day cut short all our hopes and fears about our only remaining boy. At an early hour this morning his eye became dull, Anna tried repeatedly to make him take nourishing drink, but without effect.’ This is from the diary of John Allen Giles, an historian primarily known as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and history, who died 140 years ago. Though his long diary is full of relatively short and mundane entries (even about his own wedding), he does occasionally write more emotionally and at length, as in the entry about the death of his son.

Giles was born in 1808 at Southwick House, in Mark, Somerset. He was educated at Charterhouse and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, successfully completing his degree and MA before becoming a fellow at the same college. Though planning to become a barrister, his parents persuaded him to go into the church. He was ordained deacon in 1832 and priest in 1835. He held the curacy of Cossington, Somerset, jointly with the headship of Bridgwater School. In 1833, he married Anna Sarah Dickinson, with whom he had four children; that same year vacating his fellowship. 

Having published Scriptores Græci Minores in 1831, and a Latin Grammar in 1833, he was appointed to the headmastership of Camberwell College School, and two years later, headmaster of the City of London School. However, after losing the confidence of staff and pupils he was asked to leave in 1840. He retired to Windlesham Hall, Surrey, a house he had built, and there engaged in literary work, as well as teaching private pupils. In 1846, Giles became curate of Bampton, Oxfordshire, where he continued taking in students, and where he wrote many books, at least two of which were suppressed by Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford. He produced, among others, editions of most of the major English medieval chroniclers, including The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1842), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (1847), and The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great (1858),

In 1855, Giles was imprisoned for falsifying details of a wedding ceremony (which had been an act of kindness for one of his employees), serving three months of a year-long sentence. He moved to Notting Hill, and in 1857 took the curacy, with sole charge, of Perivale in Middlesex. In 1861 he became curate of Harmondsworth, but resigned after a year and went to live at Cranford, where he again took on pupils, subsequently moving to Ealing. In 1867 he bought the living of Sutton in Surrey, which he held for 17 years. He died at the rectory there on 24 September 1884. Further information is available at Wikipedia and the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography (log-in required).

Giles kept a diary for most of his adult life. He left behind six manuscript volumes written up, mostly in 1878, as a fair copy from rough contemporaneous notes. The manuscripts were passed down through the family, and eventually gifted to the Bodleian Library. They were edited by David Bromwich for the Somerset Record Society and published in 2000 as The Diary and Memoirs of John Allen Giles. Here are several extracts as found in the published edition.

17 December 1833
‘I was married this morning in Bridgewater parish church and went back to a collation at the house of Mr Dailey at the end of West Street, to which he had lately removed from Huntworth. After the usual ceremonies, Anna and I started in a post chaise towards Bristol on our way to Oxford; but, owing to various delays we did not get beyond Crosse, and stopped for the night at the last inn on the road towards Shut-shelf, at the angle formed by the road over the hill and the road to Axbridge.’

18 December 1833
‘We started this morning rather late by a coach which went in the direction which we intended to take; but before we had gone far, I was seized with pain similar to what I had felt some few months before, and we were obliged to stop at Whitechurch, where I passed the night very ill at ease. The people at the Inn did all they could to relieve me.’

19 December 1833
‘I was able to continue the journey to Cheltenham, where we again slept, at the Plough Inn.’

20 December 1833
‘Went on to Oxford and took apartments at a house nearly opposite All Saints church in the High Street. Douglas Giles was residing in St Mary Hall Lane.’

21 December 1833
‘We went to breakfast this morning in Corpus, at the rooms of Crouch, who was next to me in the college list, and by my removal would succeed to a fellowship. After breakfast he went off to Christ Church cathedral to be ordained, but seemed much puzzled to know whether it was necessary for him to wear a white neck-tie or not.’

6 February 1934
‘We went to a large evening party or conversazione at Mr Cantwell’s , No25 Wimpole street. Old Mr Wood, for some time an itinerant lecturer on ancient history, was present. He once spent an evening at my father’s house, and somewhat astonished me both in history and etymology. He said Stonehenge was an antediluvian structure destroyed by the deluge, and derived “righteous’’ not from “right,” but as a corruption from “rightwise.” He however made himself very agreeable this evening, and showed that he was in general very well informed.’

16 February 1934
‘Our man servant John went to Mr Pickering’s in Chancery Lane and brought home the works of Matthew Paris. The same morning Mr Charles Grant, who had taken the pencil drawing (coloured) of me several years before at Oxford, took a sitting of Anna and me for the oil paintings which we still have.’

18 February 1934
‘Anna and 1 dined with Mr Melhuish, a most wealthy and respectable merchant, living at Peckham. His son, who attended the Camberwell Collegiate School, was a very genteel and well-behaved boy, but backward in his learning, from ill health. He had some complaint in his knee, and had a stump fixed to it, on which he walked, the leg sticking out behind him caused him much embarrassment in moving about among the school-boys.’

21 February 1934
‘I spent the afternoon at the British Museum, copying out some Latin poems of George Herbert, which I was preparing to edit for Mr Pickering.’

3 March 1934
‘Anna and I dined at Mr Webb’s, where we met Dr Laing and his two daughters Nancy and Jemima. Mr Walsh also, who held a good appointment in the Custom House, an antiquary, a virtuoso, and a dandy, was present; also another gentleman who knew Bp Heber and W. H. Ireland who forged the Shakespear Manuscripts. Dr Laing kept a school of verv respectable boys, and Anna knew him from her childhood.’

24 May 1837
‘This day cut short all our hopes and fears about our only remaining boy. At an early hour this morning his eye became dull, Anna tried repeatedly to make him take nourishing drink, but without effect. At a quarter before 7 o’clock she offered him some, but he said “No, no!”. She said to him “Arté, Arté, where’s papa?” Upon which he threw back his right arm over, as I lay beside him in the bed. At 7 o’clock his breathing for a minute or two became thick: the dreadful cough was coming on, but want of strength prevented it; one or two long gasps for breath succeeded, and my poor child was gone. The room was still covered with his playthings, the box of tools which Smith the baker had given him only a week before, and the box of bricks which had so often furnished him amusement. His third birthday, if he had lived so long, would have been the 10th of September. He had endeared himself to all the family in a thousand ways: no doubt the case is the same with other persons in the case of their first two or three children, and we now felt that our house was left desolate. The little fellow used to sit with me every day in my little library at Camberwell, whilst I was writing, and would play for hours with an old knife, wooden spoon, steel pencil-case, ivory paper-knife, piece of sealing-wax and many other such articles, which I kept in the cabinet, and took out occasionally to amuse him. It was not 2 months ago that I found him in the long passage of the City of London School running up and down among 300 of the boys, all of whom seemed as delighted as he was. He was a general favourite with all our friends both at Camberwell and elsewhere. He was an especial favourite with my father and all at Frome. His second visit to Frome in last December & January had particularly endeared him to my father, who seldom came into the room without taking him on his knee and singing the old song “Arthur O’Bradley.” That which gave me the greatest pleasure was the readiness with which he acquired the names of my books. Those which he knew the best were - The Byzantine Historians - Dr Johnson’s Works - Dr Lardner’s Works - Sir Philip Sydney - The Cruquian Scholiast - Gregorius Corinthius - and the Forty Commentators. Thus, by his death our house was desolate. In the afternoon we received the visits of several friends, all of whom were grieved but not surprized to hear what had happened.’

25 May 1837
‘Mrs Thurlby, of Camberwell Grove, called and sate more than two hours with us. She was deeply grieved at the loss of our poor boy, whom, next to her only child Ann, she loved better than any body in the world. The last time she had called before this, about a week ago, Arthur no sooner saw her than he asked for a watch which she used to give him to play with, when he was at her house, which was next to our own at Camberwell. The last visit he paid her was about 5 weeks ago: I carried him part of the way, and he walked the rest, until we reached Mr Thurlby’s house. As we passed our old residence in Chatham Place, No 17, in Camberwell Grove, he said pointing to it “Der is de old house, papa!” As Mr Coleman, who occupied it, was my undertenant until my own tenancy expired, we went in to call, and Arthur went at once to the folding doors which separated the dining room from the library behind it, and said “Is dat papa’s liblaly?

3 February 1862
‘Date of a letter to me from my college friend Dr Bloxam about the Chichele professorship of History at Oxford, for which I meant to become a candidate. But my connection with Oxford was now so slight that I had little chance, and indeed cared little about it. I am naturally disinclined to discharge public duties, and above all things hate committees, whereas in these days almost every thing is done by a committee.’

13 February 1862
‘I was agreeably surprized at receiving a letter from the Rev. Evan Davies, formerly master of the Grammar School at Dorchester, of whom I had heard nothing for 40 years - Also an almost illegible letter from a stranger Mr Upton of Cashel in Ireland.

23 April 1862
‘This morning, as I was in Bosworth’s shop in Regent Street, Mr Herbert Watkin, who occupied the rooms upstairs, ran down and begged me to go up and sit for a photograph. I went by invitation to a conversazione at the Marybone Institution, where the first thing I saw was my own photograph in a frame over the fire-place.

Mr Herbert Watkin no doubt knew that I had delivered a lecture at the rooms of that institution and therefore was likely to be known to the members.

About this time I got many letters from my friends hoping I should obtain the professorship at Oxford, and from others who tried to assist me.’

24 May 1862
‘This afternoon as my servant was driving me home from W. Drayton in my dog-cart some pleasure vans came furiously along the road and struck against us, breaking the carriage in such a way that, although the owner of the vans professed to mend it, the cart was fit for nothing afterwards.’

5 July 1862
‘A garden party at Fulham Palace.’

18 August 1862
‘A letter dated this day reached me at Frank’s house, Stourbridge, but I was so pressed for time that I was obliged to return home without going to see William and Anna Louisa as I could have wished.

About this time I began to enquire about an advowson of some living which I might buy, so as to present Herbert to it hereafter. Also at this very time Mr DeBurgh, instigated by his wife, who hated me as a liberal churchman, and afterwards became a Roman Catholic, tried to eject me from the vicarage house at Harmondsworth. I of course resisted, and compelled him to consent to my remaining up to a certain time, when I promised to give up the Vicarage House.’

16 September 1862
‘Date of a letter from Sophy de Vere with a polite invitation from Mrs O’Brien to pay them a visit. Mrs O’Brien told Sophy that she could not put down my life of Thomas à Becket, so thoroughly did she agree with me about him.

Anderson and Free Cinema

‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them.’ This is from the acclaimed diaries of the film maker and theatre director Lindsay Gordon Anderson, who died 30 years ago today. A major cultural figure of his time, he was a leading light in the so-called Free Cinema movement that foreshadowed social realism in British film making. 

Anderson was born in 1923 in Bangalore, South India, where his father had been stationed with the British Army. His parents separated in 1926. Lindsay was educated at Saint Ronan’s School in Worthing, at Cheltenham College (where he met his lifelong friend and biographer, Gavin Lambert), and at Wadham College, University of Oxford. He served in the Army from 1943 until 1946, latterly working as a cryptographer for the Intelligence Corps. Returning to Oxford, he switched from classics to English, graduating in 1948.

Anderson worked as film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine, which he co-founded with Lambert, Peter Ericsson and Karel Reisz, before contributing to the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. By the late 1940s, he had begun to experiment with film-making himself, directing the 1948 Meet the Pioneers, a documentary about a conveyor-belt factory.

With Reisz, Anderson organised, for the Institute, a series of screenings of independent short films by himself and others. He developed a philosophy of cinema for which he coined the term Free Cinema - to denote a movement in the British cinema inspired by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. Anderson and other members of the movement allied themselves with left-wing politics and took their themes from contemporary urban working-class life.

One of Anderson’s early short films, Thursday’s Children (1954), concerning the education of deaf children, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. And, in 1963, he directed This Sporting Life based on a novel by David Storey and produced by Reisz. These films are seen as among the forerunners of an emergent cinema of social realism. Anderson is best remembered for his ‘Mick Travis trilogy’, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as the title character: If.... , O Lucky Man!. and Britannia Hospital. Anderson was also a significant  theatre director, long associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where he directed many plays, especially those by Storey.

Anderson never married, but he seems to have yearned for male relationships, especially with his leading men such as Richard Harris (star of This Sporting Life). Some in his circle found it difficult that he did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality (despite, one can conclude, a growing acceptance of homosexuality, especially in the creative industries). He died on 30 August 1994. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the BFI.

In 2004, Methuen published The Diaries: Lindsay Anderson as edited by Paul Sutton. The publisher states: ‘Throughout his life Anderson stood in opposition to the establishment of his day. Published for the first time, his diaries provide a uniquely personal document of his artistic integrity and vision, his work, and his personal and public struggles. Peopled by a myriad of artists and stars - Malcolm McDowell, Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Anthony Hopkins Brian Cox, Karel Reisz, Arthur Miller, George Michael - the Diaries provide a fascinating account of one of the most creative periods of British cultural life.’ The full work can be borrowed digitally online at Internet Archive, or sampled at Goooglebooks. Several extracts from the diaries can be found in the Diary Review’s Happy Days with Peggy; more about the diaries themselves can be found at the University of Stirling website.

From Paul Sutton’s introduction to the Diaries:

‘Anderson started writing his diary in 1942, when he was eighteen years old, preparing for active service in the Second World War and about to study Classics at Oxford. For much of the rest of his life, he used the diary as a means to organise his thoughts, to spur himself into action, and to pass the time on long international flights. As with any diary, there are omissions. For example, there are no diary records from August 1955 until January 1960 (thus missing out his first theatrical triumphs); only four diary days of 1960 have survived; only three days in 1961 have any record; and no diary has yet surfaced for 1968 (the year he made If . . .). In his last years, the diary took the form of notebook jottings and copies of letters dictated to his secretary. [. . .]

In the most poignant passages, the diary becomes a self-analytical tract, or poem, that reaches into the heart of light and shade within himself. In the diary we can trace, too, the genesis and the growth of a body of films and plays with a clarity and a thoroughness that is rarely possible. For example, in 1987, in Maine, he closed his feature film career, making good a promise to a friend by directing Bette Davis in The Whales of August. In the diaries, many years earlier, we read of boyhood visits to the cinema to see films starring Bette Davis; in the Second World War, stationed, like his father before him, in India, we read of a bicycle trip into New Delhi to see Davis in Mr Skeffington, and in the busy year of 1965, he was a guest of Bette Davis in New England, coaxing her into a new play on Broadway that was never to be. This is all a part of the fabric of life, an artist’s life, a half-century of weavings of work-thoughts and meetings that coheres into a portrait not just of an artist, but his art, and his time.

So that the diaries could be published in one volume, they have been edited down from perhaps a million words into the current form. [. . .] I’ve included what I feel to be the essential Anderson: the entries that give the clearest picture of a remarkable man, the society in which lived, and a body of work that up till now has never been given the attention it deserves.’

Here are several extracts including the first of the published entries.

1 January 1942
‘One of my principal New Year’s resolutions is to keep a journal. In this journal I shall write only when I have something to say; its purpose is both to remind me in after years of how I felt and what I did at this time and also - quite unashamedly - to give me literary exercise. It should help improve my style and my ability to express myself and many of the incidents it records will no doubt prove excellent copy. I will however not tell lies in order to improve a story.

I am not sure whether or not it will be absolutely frank: I am not used to writing solely to myself - and that perhaps is why I am so quick to mistrust published diaries. So at first at any rate I will probably be fairly reserved. And yet this is absurd: either I am writing for myself, or for a friend or friends or for publication. I can cross out the last - though, of course, I can easily expurgate it if necessary. Nor am I writing for my friends. I will therefore resolve to be utterly frank - a resolution which I do not think I can possibly keep! So here we go.’ 

4 June 1945
‘Ah sex! How obvious it is that without a satisfactorily adjusted sex life, a full and happy life is impossible: and I am chiefly frightened now that the repressions and introversion inevitable for me may end in twisting me, incapacitating me somehow as a person or as an artist (if I am an artist). I feel an increasing need to come out into the open - I have no more to be ashamed of than anybody else - though this of course is impossible.

And the deeper in I get, the further I am from spontaneity and simplicity, and the more difficult relations will become. Besides there is a very positive need for physical intercourse which, if continually repressed, may seep in and poison all my friendships.
I need the help probably of a technician in this sort of thing, a psycho-analyst. I need to find out whether I am irredeemably homosexual. Whether my instincts can or should be repressed or allowed scope or subliminated. How? All very simple really. The only danger seems to be a tendency to treat sex as a mere physical act like excreting. That must be guarded against.

I shall certainly do this when I get back to England.’

19 June 1963
‘The pages are a challenge, and though often people think that writing a diary is unhealthy - as it certainly can be, when it confirms a tendency to turn in on oneself - it can also be the reverse, forcing one to objectify, to pursue one’s thoughts, to marshal them and use them. And although, at the age of forty it is a little chilling to think one is starting again, it is still possible one may yet improve.

I think of Richard, of that side of him which has a somewhat insidious appeal to me: the dark, powerful and sadistic side, proud and narcissistic, to which I play the servant while he plays the king. . . He has just read the proof copy of Radcliffe and rang me up to say it’s marvellous: where did David [Storey] get it from? I wonder for an instant if there’s anything in it of him and me. . . is there? Not too much I imagine. When did he start the book? I told him David had spoken of it before we met. . . He talked of the idea of filming it and, momentarily, I wonder also if he would like to direct it.

Knowing Richard, and experiencing these extremes of warmth and cold, the gentleness and the violence, the reason and the hysteria, has certainly been an education for me . . . making real and comprehensible much that before was only theoretical. It is a battle of wills, and it is something of an experience to find myself in a relationship where my will is the weaker, where, intermittently, I am made to accept domination, and made to accept behaviour - treatment - I would accept from none other, through fear of losing favour. It’s interesting that for all my masochism in fantasy, I am not able (so far) to enjoy consciously the treatment in practice. When on the stage of the Royal Court, Richard grasps me by the throat - I am conscious only of the will to stand firm, to survive . . . In little, I suppose this does crystalise the Radcliffe relationship . . . But how far from (for instance) the relationship we had at Cannes where he was all kisses and appreciation: “I don’t know how you put up with me.”

Of course it is precisely this duality of nature, this comprehension of evil and goodness, that gives Richard a quality of genius as an actor. So that to wish that he were always ‘nice’ is to wish him other than he is - an impossibility anyway. And since it is what he is that attracts me so: why should I wish him otherwise?’

My own diaries have mentioned Anderson a few time, most recently in this extract.

12 February 2018
‘For once, I found something to read in The Guardian on Saturday. The obituary of a writer called David Sherwin. I didn’t have any memory of him (nor does his name occur anywhere in my diaries) but he was the writer of the three remarkable and radical films directed by Lindsay Anderson in the 1970s and 1980s all starring Malcolm McDowell: If. . ., O Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital. For much of my youth, Anderson was one of my favourite directors (second only to Nicolas Roeg) because of these films, but, I read, it was Sherwin who was the instigator and creative energy behind them - although all three films were very much a collaboration between Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell. The Guardian also published a few thoughts by McDowell himself on Sherwin. Here’s one para: ‘Our production company was called SAM Productions, for Sherwin, Anderson and McDowell. With the Mick Travis [McDowell’s character] trilogy, David wrote three amazing films. Crusaders (which became If…) was David’s original idea, which Lindsay took and made mostly about his own life. Coffee Man (which became O Lucky Man!) was mainly my story. Britannia Hospital is more David’s.‘

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 30 August 2014.

Innumerable ripples; countless diamonds

Here is a fourth sample chapter from the yet-to-be-published London in Diaries, this one about Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, a bookbinder associated with the late 19th century Arts and Craft movement. His diary, more than any other, reveals a passionate relationship with London’s most important (historically and geographically) feature: the River Thames. See also The Drama of London in WWI, 34 heads on London Bridge, and I was utterly amazed!.

Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, bookbinder by the Thames

No feature of London - not even St Paul’s or the White Tower - has as much physical presence or historical importance as the river Thames. Indeed, it has been around much longer than the city itself, and has been the most significant factor in the city’s growth over the years. Many of the diarists in this collection mention the river, but none have as vital or as spiritual a connection as Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, and none write of it as romantically, as here: ‘What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the the outstretched sheet of water.’ He was an extraordinary man in many ways, abandoning a legal career, he took up with William Morris’s Arts and Craft movement, becoming a highly-skilled bookbinder and printer. Apart from lyrical descriptions of the river, it figures often in his exquisitely-written diary for more practical reasons, whether because he is walking with his lover along the Embankment, setting up a business in a house with a garden that runs down to the riverbank, or secretly at night drowning blocks of valuable metal type.

Thomas James Sanderson was born in 1840, at Alnwick in Northumberland. His father, James, was a district surveyor of taxes who worked his way up to become a Special Commissioner of Income Tax at Somerset House. After grammar school, Thomas studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, aiming to enter the church, but he left without taking a degree, apparently in protest against the examination system. After a period of soul searching, he was called to the Bar as a member of the Inner Temple, where he worked throughout the 1870s. He was involved in establishing the powers, rights and obligations of the London and North Western Railway Company, a task which debilitated his health, and led him to go abroad to recuperate.

In Siena, in 1861, he met Janey Morris (wife of William who, still in his 20s, was in the process of launching a new-style company to supply decorative arts). Janey was with two daughters of Richard Cobden, a well-known British manufacturer and statesmen. The following year Thomas married the younger Cobden daughter Anne (she was 29 at the time, and he 41), and, out of respect for her father, changed his own surname to Cobden-Sanderson. Soon after, he left the Bar and, eager to work with his hands in the spirit of the evolving Arts and Crafts movement, took up a suggestion by Janey Morris, to train as a bookbinder. He and Anne lived first in Hendon and then in Hampstead; and they had two children, Richard and Stella. 

Cobden-Sanderson took his new craft to the highest level, binding classic works of literature in simple but sumptuous floral designs with gold on leather. Unusually, he chose which books to bind, and sold them through Bains in the Haymarket. By the late 1880s, his bound books were much in demand from American buyers. Both Thomas and Anne were early socialists. Anne became a leading campaigner for woman’s suffrage, and was arrested in 1909 for picketing outside 10 Downing Street (and kept a diary while in prison). She also did much to press for various improvements in children’s well-being. 

In the early 1890s, Cobden-Sanderson started the Doves Bindery at 15 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, a small house with a garden running down to the Thames, not far from William Morris’s Kelmscott House. At first, he employed several professional binders to work on individual books as he had done, but, in 1890, he launched, in partnership with Emery Walker, the Doves Press, and thereafter the Bindery worked more mundanely to cover printed editions. Between 1900 and 1917, the Doves Press produced 50 classic titles (Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, the Bible, etc), all in the so-called Doves Type (designed by Walker) and all austere, characterised by a lack of illustration and ornament, in reverence to the literature itself.

Although the partnership with Walker, who had other interests, had been dissolved in 1908, it allowed Cobden-Sanderson to continue using the Doves Type until his death, at which time it would revert to Walker. Fearing his ex-partner might not use the type in a way he thought fitting, Cobden-Sanderson chose to destroy it. He did this during many nights in the latter half of 1916 by throwing the metal blocks into the Thames. Subsequently, he wrote to Walker’s lawyers, and his actions became public knowledge. Cobden-Sanderson died in 1922, and Anne was left to settle, at some personal cost, the legal action brought against her husband by Walker.

Throughout most of his life Cobden-Sanderson kept a regular diary. This was edited by his son, Richard, and published in 1926 in two volumes as The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922. They reveal the author as a spiritual man, high-minded and intellectual, lacking perhaps a little in humour and colour himself, though the details that emerge of his life and those of others in the Arts and Crafts movement are immensely interesting, not least those about the early life-changing suggestion by Janey Morris and those about the disposal of the Doves Type. And through all of his life, apparently, and the diary, runs the River Thames which regularly inspires him to flights of literary fancy.

Annie back from Chelsea
31 May 1883
Yesterday Annie and I walked together on the Embankment towards Westminster, I to the Long Gallery, she to the Abbey to wait till I had done. But the day was so lovely, the sun so bright, the river so attractive, that when I suggested that we should walk on the river-side of the road, she suddenly bethought herself of Walter Sickert at Chelsea, and should she not go by water to see him? I backed her up, and so at the next pier we parted; she went down the landing steps - the tide was very low - and I continued along the Embankment, looking back from time to time. Presently her steamer approached the pier, paused and came off again - I watched it approach, and a wave of a parasol drew my eyes to my darling. I waved my hand and hat, and smiled to her. [. . .]

Here there came a knock at the door, and my diary fell to the ground as I rushed to open it. It was Annie back from Chelsea. We embraced, and then she hurriedly began to tell me of a girl whom she had met on the steamer, red-haired, consumptive, Scotch, an envelope folder or sorter, returning from the Brompton Hospital where she was an out-patient. (She ought to be an in-patient, but could get no letter). [. . .] She got 1d. for 1,000 envelopes, and, when well, made 12s a week.

Why don’t you learn bookbinding?
24 June 1883
Yesterday afternoon we called at the Morrises, and in the evening supped with the William Richmonds, where we again saw the Morrises. I was talking to Mrs Morris after supper, and saying how anxious I was to use my hands - “Then why don’t you learn bookbinding?” she said. “That would add an Art to our little community, and we would work together. I should like,” she continued, “to do some little embroideries for books, and I would do so for you.” Shall bookbinding, then, be my trade?

26 June 1884
I am now the proprietor of a workshop! On Saturday I signed an agreement by virtue of which I became on Tuesday last the tenant under Mr Williams (of Williams and Norgate [a bookseller]), of three rooms of the second floor of 30 Maiden Lane, being part of the back premises of Williams and Norgate’s shop in Henrietta Street at £50 per annum.

23 July 1884
On Monday, Morris and the Hyndmans came to lunch with us, and I afterwards went with them to Hyde Park to take the opportunity of the Liberal demonstration to spread socialistic literature and to hold an open-air meeting. This last was a fiasco, being brought to an ignominious close by an ugly rush of the crowd.

27 August 1885
On Saturday Annie and I went to the meeting for the protection of young girls, in Hyde Park. Mrs Morris was in the procession of the Ladies’ National Society, and Morris in the brake of the Socialist League.

A body of art which quite startles
2 April 1886
I went on to St James’s to see the Graham pictures on view at Christie’s. Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and F. Walker - prodigious performances. They, and the works of Millais and Holman Hunt on view in Bond Street, constitute a body of art which quite startles by its greatness.

24 December 1886
Yesterday I went into town to do some shopping. I called at Bain’s [booksellers]. He told me with great joy that he had only one of my books left - The Gospels!

28 March 1891
On Wednesday last I went to the British Museum to see a collection of drawings arranged by Sidney Colvin, and later I went to Hammersmith to see Morris. I found Mrs Morris very happy, for he was very much better. He was having his supper - oysters etc. When he finished, I went into his room, and found him sitting in a chair by the fire with a large silk handkerchief spread over his knees. He looked - despite his supper! - a little empty, his clothes hanging somewhat loosely upon him. But he was cheery and hopeful, and fell to talking about the new book (The Glittering Plain) now in the course of printing at the Morris Press. It promises to be a very beautiful book. [The Glittering Plain, a novel by Morris, is considered to be one of the first in a genre now called fantasy.]

The occasional sound of an oar turning 
4 April 1891
Last Sunday I visited Morris’s printing press. Morris was a little down; not up to talking. 

The Press has been set up in a little cottage opposite The Doves, and next door to Sussex House [Upper Mall, north bank of the Thames in Hammersmith], and is worked by two compositors and one pressman - of course all by hand. I saw the new type, and the sheets, paper and vellum, already printed The Glittering Plain.

4 July 1895
I am reading Pater’s study of Dionysus. It is delightfully silent. From the window I see the lights on and beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and the lengthened reflection on the dark river, and I hear the occasional sound of an oar turning in the rowlocks; but the tide is low, and the otherwise-sounding river is still, sounding only with the passing toiling barge, and alive with moving lights. On my table are my tools, and a glass of tiger-lilies given to me out of our garden by my cleaner, Mrs Mansel.

William Morris in a bathchair
11 October 1896
Morris is dead. He died on Saturday 3rd October at 11:30 in the morning. I saw him alive in Riverscourt Road the preceding Monday. I had been to the Bindery to get some of my books for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and I was on my way to the Gallery on my bicycle, when on turning the corner into Riverscourt Road I saw before me, going in the same direction, Morris in a bathchair, with a shawl across his shoulders [. . .].  I had never seen Morris in his chair before. It was a strange sensation to see the strong man so reduced. Yet he looked clear of complexion and ruddy red, and though he said not a word he yet lifted his gloved hand and waved me farewell as I mounted again and turned and bade him good-bye. . . a last good-bye.

21 August 1897
How superbly beautiful the river is at this moment! There is a high wind blowing the surface into innumerable ripples, each of which catches instantly and reflects a dazzling gleam from the sun, so that there are as it were countless diamonds at play, reflecting and deflecting rays of brightest light, so that the river’s face is an ever shifting . . . 

What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the outstretched sheet of water.

Education: shall we at last transform it, and with it our vision of and dealings with the world? Shall we have the energy of the light I see in dazzling brilliance playing upon the reflecting facets of the water, and play with the earth our home, and its dwelling-place, the infinite voids of space? Education will be transformed. “Arts and crafts” will invade and overcome literature and science and commerce, and with our own eyes we shall re-see the universe, and with our own hands and brains we shall re-create it afresh.

My writing splutters and fails of the mark.

Hampstead hideous with affluent vulgarity
28 September 1897
A cold mist this morning shuts out the sun, and only the near trees, now so yellow, are visible, and the outlines of the bridge. [. . .] On Sunday I went to Hampstead, and lunched with the Kapteyns, and had tea with Blomfield, and looked over the wall at the old house and home, No. 49. It looked very pretty, but Hampstead is becoming every moment more hideous with affluent vulgarity. I wheeled along the Finchley Road to the cemetery, and went and stood by the dear, quiet grave of Father and Mother.

21 January 1898
The sea-gulls - or river-gulls? - are sweeping in wide curves to and fro over the river - the river slides smoothly on its course - the wintered trees, arrested, placidly wait for the spring, the sky overhead is one continuous veil of stationary cloud.

All life at its best is poetry
9 May 1905
I have just seen Swinburne pass through the [British] library into the Large Room preceded by a lady and Watts-Dunton. Swinburne had on a grey, large, soft felt hat. His head, too, seemed vast, his shoulders, on the other hand, seemed slight and very sloping, and his figure plump but small. He walked without moving his body, or arms, which were held down straight at his sides. So passed our greatest living poet. I rose from my seat to see him, and pondered upon the insignificance and significance of things. The library remained as undisturbed as the surface of a lake and its whole body of water by the entrance of an undistinguishable pebble.

30 May 1905
The poets are the supreme craftsmen - the poets at their best. But all life at its best is poetry.

26 July 1908
Yesterday there was a procession, or series of processions, in support of the Licensing Bill. Annie with Stella went off early to join in it under the Suffragist banner. [. . .] I took the Turnham Green omnibus at the top of Rivercourt Road, and drove to Hyde Park Corner. There I got down, for already a procession blocked the way. I stood at the gate and watched the passing whirl; not a great stream, but great “the cause.”

25 August 1908
I went the other night to a concert at Queen’s Hall. It was a Promenade Concert, and a Wagner night. The Hall was packed. To get in I had to go to the end of a long queue extending round the building. I paid 2s., and got a seat in the balcony. The music was very loud, and filled the Hall like a great sea, and beat up into our ears as the sea does into the caves and hollows of the shore. [. . .]

Having resolved to close the Bindery next year, it seems to follow as a matter of course that I should close the Press also. But whereas I seemed to come naturally, after twenty-five years, to the former resolve, to come to the latter seemed to be against nature, there are so many great books to print and so few to bind.

Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s 
12 October 1908
Yesterday was a lost day, save that in the morning I was at Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s - the former, by the way, was the finer. St Paul’s seemed littered up with columns and architectural ornament, and the arches under the dome hideous in the meanness of their junctions coming down together, and [William Blake] Richmond’s decoration has not enlarged them. The effect of the Cathedral, on the other hand, with sun and shade and enclosed atmosphere, was quite beautiful. In both, however, the singing was enchanting.

14 October 1908
I came [to Kew Gardens] to see the great lily. But one had flowered and passed away in a day, and the next would not flower till to-morrow. I walked around the tank and saw the blossom of the flower to be, and its vast leaves outspread upon the water, slowly born and quickly dead, and so on from age to age.

Annie must not go to prison again
30 January 1909
Annie has just been in to say that Mrs Pankhurst has been proposing on the telephone to come and see her this afternoon. The Women’s Social and Political Union want Annie now to speak on their platform, perhaps “to go to prison.”

1 February 1909
I was at Kew on Saturday, and walked through the flower-house; lilies, lilac, azaleas, camellias, carnations, all, and others in sweet flower; and around them, outside, the bare dreaming trees, whose time is yet to come.

On Sunday afternoon, yesterday, Mrs Pankhurst called. She was gentle and affectionate, but, as it seemed to us all, tired. The prison immurement seemed to have damped her fire. [. . .] This is an odious result of prison, and an argument against its use as a weapon of revolt. Annie must not go again.

The Red Flag at the Albert Hall
20 November 1913
Last night I went to the Albert Hall to hear Larkin [Jim Larkin, an Irish trade unionist then heavily involved in the famous Dublin Lock-out dispute], and was disappointed. When he was speaking a raid was made on the hall by some “students” from outside. Suddenly a sound of running feet arose in the corridor, then the attention of the whole audience was concentrated on a dense commotion at one of the entrances to the hall and the passage leading down from it, and from all parts of the hall men rose from their seats and rushed towards it. The scrimmage continued with a dead sound of the struggle, but, as I remember, otherwise in silence. But from above women leant over from the balconies, and looking upon the struggle applauded. As it went on - I witnessed it from a box - limelights burst out in various parts of the hall, and finally the organ contributed its roar to the ear, playing “The Red Flag.” At last victory was cheered by the audience, and Larkin resumed his speech. The students had been driven out; but outside they raided the electric works, and tried to put out the lights of the hall, fortunately unsuccessfully. I was disappointed; not in this, which was highly dramatic and thrilling, but in Larkin’s speech.

12 December 1913
Last night Annie and I went to see and hear Anatole France [French novelist and man of letters] at the Suffolk Street Galleries, at the invitation of the Fabian Society. Bernard Shaw in the chair. Anatole France looked like an affectionate old fox, and spoke with great animation, and many smiles and many wrinkles. He was, or seemed to be, short and stout and bent and grey. Justice, Pity, Mercy, Love - these are things as wonderful as are the flowers of the field and the stars of heaven.

13 December 1913
Clear for London, and cold. Yesterday morning as I walked through Kensington I paused in front of a “provision” shop, and looked at the birds - shot, and hanging with their heads downward - golden plovers, pheasants, partridges. Pitiful sight.

The great fight at Olympia 
1 July 1914
On coming home last night between 10 and 11 o’clock after dining with Stella, I at once felt myself in an atmosphere of excitement - motors were rushing past, and newspaper boys and men were rushing about on foot, and crying hoarse, and to me unintelligible, cries. As I proceeded towards Addison Bridge - I was on my bicycle - the crowd and excitement became so great that I had to get off and walk close to the kerb. Presently the crowd was impenetrable. I asked the reason why. The great fight at Olympia - which was indeed all lighted up; Bombardier Wells had just knocked Bell out in the second round, and that was it! I pulled to the side, and leaning my bicycle against the wall on the bridge, waited the passing of the crowd. Such a crowd! Old and young, rich and poor, evening dress and filth, and men, almost all, or boys, but some women on foot, in the latest limpest evening dress, some in motors; all hurrying by as if all were bearers, to some remote other world, of long expected news. [Wells beat the Australian Colin Bell, for the heavyweight championship of the British Empire and a purse of £10,000. The New York Times headline for a report of the match ran: Women flock to fight at Olympia.] 

5 August 1914
Europe and the world are now in the hands of statesmen and warriors, who have enslaved - and are now hurling against each other their enslaved - human beings, drilled to destruction. Death, not Life, and Death in another form than in times of peace, now fills to their utmost limits the minds of men, and spreads itself over all the aspects of life.

A gun mounted in peaceful Green Park
9 October 1914
A few moments ago, as I passed into [Hyde] Park, a regiment of recruits marched by - it brought tears to my eyes.

8 February 1915
In the Green Park, newly erected, there is an enclosure and platform, and on the latter, with its muzzle appearing above the screen, is mounted a gun. In the midst of Peaceful Green Park.

24 January 1916
This morning I walked to Kensington through the Park. At Hyde Park Corner three guns mounted on trucks passed. Horrible looking weapons, apparently for high firing. Walking on, I saw a company of soldiers doing bayonet practice, piercing sacks with a thrust of their bayonets. I had just passed the gardens on the other side, where the flowers of spring were just piercing the grass. How beautiful they were; how horrible the bayonets.

This evening I began its destruction
31 August 1916
The Doves Press type was designed after that of Jensen; this evening I began its destruction. I threw three pages into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge. I had gone for a stroll on the Mall, when it occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time; so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on till I have destroyed the whole of it.

9 February 1918
Just returned from Bow Street whither I went at 2pm to stand by Bertie Russell, on trial for some writing which I had not seen in some obscure pacifist journal. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in the second class. He appealed, and Frank and I bailed him out, otherwise he would have gone straight to prison. To prison, to solitary confinement, day and night in a locked cell. There was not a crowded court, only a gathering of friends, mainly women. [. . .] Bertie sat in front of the dock with his co-defendant, a young lady editor and proprietor of the journal in question, The Tribunal.

11 November 1918
The bells are ringing, and the guns have ceased.

12 November 1918
All London went merrily mad yesterday. I was indoors all day. All London merrily mad; all Germany?

The Oxford-Cambridge boat race
31 March 1921
The race was rowed yesterday, and after a terrific struggle - first Cambridge leading, then, at Hammersmith Bridge, Oxford, then beyond Chiswick, out of sight, Cambridge - Cambridge finally won by a length, but never once, or hardly once, was daylight seen between the boats. The crowd was immense, for the day was fine, and it was expected that the race would be a great race. We had a great crowd, and all the morning was taken up in preparing tea - cakes, tables, etc. - and arranging seats and benches in the garden. We were to be “at home” from 4 to 6pm - the race being at 5 or thereabouts - and by 4 I was exhausted, and retired to the parlour to rest.