John Langdon-Davies: poet, Conscientous Objector, pro-Anarchist (1897 – 19 71)

The Complete Self-Educator (nd. but c1939), a copy of which we found in the archives at Jot HQ the other day,  was one of those doorstep self-help books that Odhams brought out in the late thirties. We have already discussed various aspects of a companion volume in previous Jots. The Complete Self-Educator, however, is a different kind of multi-author book altogether and a much more challenging one. It sought to give the average intelligent reader a grounding in the principles of a number of important academic disciplines, including biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, economics, psychology, philosophy and logic.

Some of the writers were prominent experts in their field—people like Professor Erich Roll( psychology) and Max Black ( philosophy). Others, like Stephen Swingler, who later become a Labour minister, were relative newcomers who had published work in areas not altogether related to the subjects on which they were invited to write. One of these tyros was John Langdon- Davies, who had published books on Spain and women in society, but whose topic for the Complete Self- Educator was ‘The English Common People’.

Among the rather conventional fellow contributors Langdon-Davies stood out as a bit of a maverick. Born in Zululand, when it was part of South Africa, he came to England as a young boy and went on to attend Tonbridge School, which he hated. He was not, it must be said, officer cadet material. When he was called up in 1917 he declared himself a Conscientious Objector and as such served a short prison sentence. Declared unfit for military service, he lost two of the three scholarships for St John’s College Cambridge that he had gained at school. At Cambridge he tried to live off the remaining scholarship, but was obliged to abandon his studies. As a result, he switched his attention to the fields of archaeology and anthropology and ended up with diplomas in these disciplines. While an undergraduate Langdon-Davies did, however, manage to publish a volume of poems, The Dream Splendid, which received some favourable reviews. 

After the War Langdon-Davies embraced leftish politics, promoting the cause of women with his book A Short History of Women and embracing the anarchist cause in the Spanish Civil War with Behind the Spanish Barricades. His opposition to Nazism, fascism and ‘scientific racism’ can be gleaned from the opening paragraph of ‘The Story of the Common People’.

‘…English history is what it is because geography and geology made England what it is. We can go further than this, and say that geography and geology have made the Englishman himself what he is…’

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Visionary Speech by Earl Russell (part 3)

Found – a small folding pamphlet illustrated by Ralph Steadman and published in London by IMG_1869Open Head Press about 1980 at 50p. It came from the estate of the Dutch radical Simon Vinkenoog whose  birthday (18th July)  was the same day as this revolutionary (not to say crazy) speech was given. It has the full text of Earl Russell’s 1978 maiden speech to the House of Lords. John Conrad Russell was the son of Bertrand Russell. After the speech he left the House of Lords and was prevented from re-entering it by ushers. It is said to be the only speech given  in the Lords that is not fully recorded by Hansard. His proposal to give three quarters of the nation’s wealth to teenage girls had some coverage in the papers the next day, but the speech has never appeared in full, apart from in this rare pamphlet, this is the last part: –

Such is the present position of the United States after the war in Vietnam: the whole human race can accuse it every day. The helpless, which were physically or spiritually imprisoned, can then stand up and point the finger; revealed injuries to mankind can now stand up and accuse, with whatever rebuke pleases them. The State authorities of Europe and the United States must now admit that they have done these deeds and practice no longer the harm they have wrought. 

“Let them grant the gift of gifts, the gift of life, and not wait until death has shown his hand. People who have been imprisoned by the CIA in Latin America, or are so imprisoned today, cannot stand up and answer for themselves. It is meaningless to ask them to be gifts, the gift must proceed from you to them. If you want a man to stand up and be a man, and not be a figleaf or a shadow of himself, you have to grant him the spiritual gift to be able to do so, for the American nations of Latin America this is a genuine reality. And the same goes for all classes of oppressed persons in Europe. Reproof, or the concept of rebuke, guilt, and morality, are no use to him. Accused all the time by the pride of life and vigorous gentlemanliness which governs him, the man is all but paralysed. And the young people are accused by older persons, or older established institutions which will not remove themselves, of being pitiless pride of life to older persons, the same law applies. Rebuke, guilt, morality are no use to them. Get the pitilessness removed: and do not cause the older person, or the police, in the name of the older person, to prostitute the younger person out of unforgiveness. The punishment for such conduct is the guillotine. Cause this murder of young people to cease: abolish all institutions or spirits which cause such things. What is not granted at present is the gift of life. The older person is not granted the gift of life to be generous, kind, forgiving, or merciful to the younger person, and the younger person is forced in self-defence to defend himself against the older person. This spirit will have to leave Europe, and Latin America; and so will all the institutions which exemplify it. A relationship of extreme cruelty results, delightful to all those who relish the experience of sadism. The older person can continue at his pleasure to prostitute the younger person unless the younger person can find a way of answering him and get out of the trap. This spirit or happening is confined to England, and to the English spirit. It does not happen to Free Americans who are not subject to the powers of envy ingrained in the British Class System, which gives such spirits power. Free Americans banish the spirit, and when Americans complain of the British Royal Family for being pampered decadent and snobbish, are they not right? The Police Doll which prostitutes people is probably the responsible author of these evils: the Doll of Love, which says to a person: You are excited from Love: you must prostitute yourself. It is the British Doll, which praises and cherishes the British Jesus Christ, which is all right so long as He is praised, but not so funny if he is condemned or out of grace. Continue reading →

Visionary Speech by Earl Russell (part 1)

Found – a small folding pamphlet illustrated by Ralph Steadman and published in London by IMG_1869Open Head Press about 1980 at 50p. It has the full text of Earl Russell’s 1978 maiden speech to the House of Lords. John Conrad Russell was the son of Bertrand Russell. After the speech he left the House of Lords and was prevented from re-entering it by ushers. It is said to be the only speech given  in the Lords that is not fully recorded by Hansard. His poposal to give three quarters of the nation’s wealth to teenage girls had some coverage in the papers the next day, but the speech is rather forgotten (until now). Here is the first part. More to follow.

My Lords, I rise to raise the question of penal law and lawbreakers as such and question whether a modern society is wise to speak in terms of lawbreakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army and gives hungry and thirsty people cups of tea. If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden, you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking. Such is the proper social order for modern Western Europe, and all prisons ought to be abolished throughout its territories. Of course the Soviet Union and the United States could include themselves in these reforms too. Kindness and helping people is better than punitiveness and punishing them, a constructive endeavour is better than a destructive spirit. If anybody is in need, you help him, you do not punish him. Putting children into care and other forms of spiritual disinheritance ought to be stopped. Borstal ought to be stopped and the workings of the Mental Health Act which empowers seizure of people by the police when they are acting in a way likely be harmful to themselves or others or to be looked into.

 

What are you? Soulless robots? Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys who later as a result burn down the schoolhouse ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are present treated with indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into jails and raping them, and putting them into brothels or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills.

The spirit ought to be left free, and chaining it has injured the creative power of the nation. The young unemployed are not in any way to have become separate from governmental power, but ought to have been given enough to live on out of the national wealth to look after themselves and never ask themselves even to think  of working while there is no work to be had. Continue reading →

Anarchy magazine, 1963

 

Anarchist magazine 1963 001We at Jot 101 only have this copy of Anarchy, issue number 27 ( May 1963) as a guide to what this notable magazine was all about. We do know that it was founded by Colin Ward  in 1961 and ran under his editorship until 1970 and that regular contributors included committed anarchists like Nicolas Walter and Harry Baecker. A check list printed on the back of the front cover gives some idea of the political tone of the magazine. Each issue had a theme. The copy we have focuses on ‘Youth ‘, and this seems to have been a prominent talking point in earlier issues, along with calls to oppose capitalism, challenge educational values and generally practise non-violent disobedience and dissent. But Colin Ward was a great advocate for adventure playgrounds, so issue 7 was wholly devoted to this. There were also issues devoted to ‘ Technology, science and anarchism ‘, ‘ De-institutionisation: conflicting strains in anarchism ‘, and ‘ The work of David Wills ‘.

It would be revealing to compare the intellectual level of Anarchy with that of Class War, the agitprop mouthpiece of anarchism in the eighties and onwards run for a time by Ian Bone, who recently became a media bad guy when he cornered the children of Jacob Rees-Mogg and told them that their dad was a ‘horrible’ person.  Both magazines have in common the basic tenets of anarchism—anti-capitalism, dissent, ‘ do-it-yourself ‘, and us-versus them—but the violent undercurrent ( ‘Kill the Rich’) that characterises Class War is notably absent from Anarchy, which specifically rejected violent confrontation in favour of powerful arguments that challenged orthodoxies in society. Some of these in this ‘Youth ‘ issue are certainly worth reading.

One of the most perceptive pieces is ‘ The Young One ‘ by Nicolas Walter, which focuses on Cliff Richard, arguably the most popular male singer of a bunch that included Adam Faith, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, all three of whom Walter saw as genuine working class rebels. In contrast, Cliff, though also working-class, stands apart from his peers as distinctly conformist:

 

‘ Sometimes he looks like the politician who finds out what most per cent of the voters thinks before he thinks. But he really doesn’t like smoking, drinking, chasing girls and so on. His secret is simple—he has no secret. His personality is simple—he has not personality. He is, as Colin MacInnes once said of Tommy Steele, “ every nice young girl’s boy, every kid’s favourite elder brother, every mother’s cherished adolescent son “ . He is a non-hero of our time, an innocent idol. Continue reading →

Simon Watson Taylor: surrealist, pataphysician & cabin steward

The death in 2005 at the age of 82 of aged hippy and anarchist Simon Watson Taylor went almost unnoticed in the Arts pages and it was left to his friend and former house-mate George Melly to supply an obituary in the Independent in which he pointed out the major contributions of the writer and translator of Alfred Jarry to the Surrealist and Pataphysics movements in Europe during the fifties and sixties. On a personal level, Melly also alluded to his friend’s ‘acid humour ‘, his delight in confronting and dispatching the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, and a determination to remain free of encumbrances. At one point in his early life we are told that he took a job as an airline cabin steward in order to travel the world.Indeed, among all his friends who had some way embraced aspects of the bourgeois life- style, Melly claimed that Watson Taylor stood out as a man ‘truly free’.

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Auberon Herbert poet and voluntaryist

Found in Windfall and Waterfall (Williams & Norgate, London 1894) a volume of poetry by Auberon Herbert  - an advertisement for his journal The Free Life - the organ of Voluntaryism. Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert (Highclere, 18 June 1838 – 5 November 1906) was a writer,poet, theorist, philosopher, and 19th century individualist. A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas. He promoted a classical liberal philosophy and took the ideas of Herbert Spencer a stage further by advocating voluntary-funded government that uses force only in defence of individual liberty and private property. He is known as the originator of voluntaryism.

The poetry is competent and clean limbed, somewhat of its time but counter to the prevailing decadence of much 1890s verse. We are quoting the tract on voluntaryism and preceding it with a couple of poems. His ideas are still alive, especially in the libertarian fringes of American republican thinking...

THE UNKNOWN SHORE.
It falls on my ear, now faint, now strong,
The thunderous note of the distant roar,

The surf of the sea I have sailed so long - ,
As it beats at last on the unknown shore.

Oh ! how will it be, when the hour has come,-
Unlike all hours that went before, —

Will help be near, or in pain and fear,

Shall I win my way to the unknown shore ?


IN BORDERLAND.
For strange deep longings move us,
As betwixt the two we stand,

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