Orwell and A. S. M. Hutchinson: II
*
Introduction. In part one of this article I looked at Orwell’s references to A. S. M., (Arthur Stuart Menteth), Hutchinson; and at Hutchinson’s early life. I left him a successful forty-two year old First World War veteran and writer. Here I look at his later life.
This Freedom (Hodder and Stoughton, 1922) was A. S. M Hutchinson’s fifth novel, achieving its fifth edition in 1924. It attacked the rising feminist movement. Women had gained the vote in Britain and the USA and could enter nearly all professions. The man shortage in Britain after the First World War led to many women of all classes being unable to marry and having to work.
Rebecca West (the pen-name of Cicely Isabel Andrews née Fairfield a novelist, literary critic and journalist) criticised the novel This Freedom in an article ‘Wives, Mothers and Homes‘ in the October 1922 issue of Good Housekeeping, though This Freedom had its defenders including G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, a professional Catholic convert of Father Brown fame.
Hutchinson’s next book was The Eight Wonder and Other Stories a short story collection (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1923). They published his seventh book One Increasing Purpose in London in 1925.
Marriage. On Thursday 18 February 1926 Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson, forty five, married Una Rosamund Bristow-Gapper, twenty three, at Christ Church in Westminster. She was born at Simla in India on 6 August 1903 and baptised there on 26 September 1903.
Una Rosamund Bristow- Gapper’s parents were John Henry Bristow-Gapper, a British Police Officer in India, who was Secretary to the Adjutant General of the Indian Army; and Rose Margaret Bristow-Gapper née Gereson. John Henry Bristow Gapper died on 20 November 1903, at Dalhousie, in Himalchal Pradesh in British India, aged forty one, when his daughter was less than four months old. Una Bristow-Gapper had three older siblings one of whom died in infancy.
Una Bristow-Gapper, an accomplished musician, had composed several songs including Twas June and Silhoutette. She had read and admired A. S. M. Hutchinson’s books. They had exchanged letters about them and their friendship turned into love. Their marriage was a private affair. It was conducted by the Reverend Paul Thomas Radford Rowe Kirk, the Vicar of Christchurch, Broadway**, Westminster. He was assisted by his curate the Reverend David Railton*.
There were four witnesses to Arthur and Una’s wedding: the bride’s mother and sister; his mother and his sister, the novelist Miss Vere Hutchinson (see part one of this article). The newly-weds honeymooned in the South of France. They were to have two sons: Simon Hutchinson was born in March 1927 in Iowa in the USA, allegedly named after the hero of Our Increasing Purpose; while Andrew Stuart Menteth Hutchinson was born in Eastbourne in Sussex on 16 April 1934.
The Uncertain Trumpet. In 1929 Hodder and Stoughton published Hutchinson’s next novel The Uncertain Trumpet and Little Brown of Boston published it in the USA. 1929 saw the Wall Street Crash.
To quote the Saturday 19 October 1929 Sacramento Bee:
A. S. M. Hutchinson has returned to the fiction field with the “Uncertain Trumpet”, a novel in which the sins of the flesh are set off against those of the spirit.
The fleshly sinner is Banjo Heritage a young man who is disreputable but gay, living a life of solitary idleness, although the possessor of a medical degree. The spiritual sinner is his older brother Pelham Heritage who is perfectly correct in his outward manner, but inclined to be narrow in heart and uncharitable in spirit. The trouble begins when Pelham brings home as his bride to Great House a young and unsophisticated girl, Dawn Chase.
He is greatly concerned with Dawn’s spiritual welfare. He fears for her soul should she come in contact with the fox hunting set of the surrounding estates. Naturally, however, Dawn must meet Banjo, and Banjo promptly falls in love with his brother’s wife. And he convinces himself that it is his duty to rescue her from a cold and loveless marriage.
It is around this situation and that complications inherent in it that Hutchinson has written “The Uncertain Trumpet”. How he solves it must be left to the reader to determine.
The “Uncertain Trumpet” is well written, the characters clearly defined and consistent. It is the conclusion that leaves one slightly incredulous.
Sacramento is the California state capital. The word gay has changed its meaning since 1929. It used to mean lively and sexually active rather than being a male homosexual as it does today.
The Book of Simon, Hutchinson’s ninth book was published in 1930 by both Hodder and Stoughton and Little Brown. To quote the Thursday 25 September 1930 Dundee Courier it was dedicated: To Simon from his affectionate parents hoping that when he is old enough to read it, he will not upbraid his father for having written it.
Which we can explain using the Sunday 14 December 1930 Sunday Record, a Colombia***, South Carolina, newspaper: The author of numerous English novels, A. S. M. Hutchinson gives us a delightful history of his small son from infancy to three years. Deliciously humorous and something a little deeper.
Later Books. A. S. M. Hutchinson had eight more books published. They were:
The Golden Pound, a collection of short stories (Hodder and Stoughton 1930).
Big Business, a novel (Hodder and Stoughton 1932) written at the worst depths of the Great Depression.
The Soft Spot (Hodder and Stoughton 1933) published in the year Hitler came to power in Germany.
Year of the Locust (Nicholson and Watson 1935).
As Once You Were (Nicholson and Watson, and Little Brown, 1938) written in the year of Munich when Neville Chamberlain betrayed Czechoslovakia in the hope of averting another world war; but in fact merely delayed it by less than a year and ensured that the allies fought it on worse terms.
To quote William Stanley Hoole, the Baylor University**** Librarian, writing in the Waco, Texas, Tribune-Herald: As Once You Were is very definitely good. For two reasons: (1) He still tells a good story well; and (2) he has a plot the roots of which reach out and down into the very lives of everyone who reads it.
The plot involves a middle aged Englishman who has retired from his profession, rents an old country house, buys a bicycle and takes up stamp collecting. He hopes to recapture his childhood and to: leave behind him all the petty hatreds of mankind, all thoughts of war, jealousy, greed, and live for once spiritually, comfortably as he would like.
The hero of this novel faces new challenges in the country village he has moved to. They include an unpredictable housekeeper; her nephew to whom the hero agrees to give a home; a beggar who he restores to respectability; and a young novelist with whose fiancée he falls in love.
The 1939 National Register lists A. S. M. Hutchinson living in Eastbourne in Sussex with his wife, one of their two sons, and their forty eight year old housekeeper. Within a year the Southeast English coast changed from being a quiet retreat for holiday makers and the retired rich; to being one of the dark places of the earth.
He Looked for a City (Michael Joseph, 1940). This year saw the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the beginning of the Blitz (see part one of this article).
It Happened Like This (Michael Joseph 1943). In 1943 the tide of the Second World War finally turned. By the end of 1943 there was no way that Germany or Japan could win by conventional means; but could the allies win before they became exhausted, fell out among themselves, or the Germans or the Japanese developed nuclear weapons?
To quote the Friday 14 May 1943 Liverpool Echo: A. S. M. Hutchinson’s latest novel “It Happened Like This” (Michael Joseph, 9s 6d) is an unassuming but exciting tale of a wicked guardian and his two wards – pleasantly mischievous little boys who give their uncle some excellent opportunities for staging a perfect double murder. Although the reader very soon suspects that there is a helping hand behind the children’s peculiar adventures, suspense is splendidly maintained. The climax is as good as that of any thriller.
Final Years. AHutchinson’s sales fell hence his changing publishers, and his health deteriorated. In his later years he published his final book titled O Swinburne. Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in 1837; was a poet, literary critic, playwright and novelist; was closely associated with the Pre Raphaelite and Aesthetic Movements; and died in 1909 aged seventy two.
This final A. S. M. Hutchinson book was privately printed in Betheseda in Maryland, USA in 1960. In other words it was self-published or to put it less kindly a vanity publication. It is not listed as a source for the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s life of Swinburne. Betheseda is a suburb of Washington, District of Colombia, the American capital.
The End. In 1968 Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson had part of a leg amputated because of gangrene. He died on Saturday 14 March 1971, aged 91, of dementia and a heart attack at 10 New Forest Lodge, Beacon Road, in Crowborough, in Uckfield Registration District in East Sussex. His second son Andrew informed the authorities of his father’s death. Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson left £1,747
Four and a half years later Una died aged seventy five on 7 October 1975 of an acoustic neuroma at Laverstock Nursing Home in Tunbridge Wells. Her daughter in law, Valerie Mabel Hutchinson, informed the authorities of her mother in law’s death. Una Hutchinson left £1,796.
I do not know what happened to Simon Hutchinson. His younger brother married in 1961; fathered three sons and two daughters; lost one son in infancy; and died at Woking in Surrey in 2017 aged eighty two.
*
* The Reverend Railton was born in 1884 the son of George Scott Railton a senior Salvation Army Officer; studied at Keble College, Oxford; converted to Anglicanism; was ordained; was a military chaplain in the First World War; won the Military Cross in 1916 for rescuing a wounded officer and two other wounded soldiers under fire; inspired the creation of the Westminster Abbey Memorial to the Unknown Soldier; held various livings; died in a train accident in 1955 aged seventy; and was survived by his wife and five children.
** The original Christ Church, Broadway, Westminster, was built in 1638-1642, just before the Civil War, as a Chapel of Ease for St Margaret’s Westminster. This Christ Church was replaced by an 1844 Victorian building which was destroyed on 17 April 1941 in a Second World War Nazi air raid. In 1946 the site was sold and the ruins demolished. The tower was demolished in 1954. A Telephone Exchange was built on the church site.
*** Colombia, the South Carolina state capital, was burnt in 1865 by Sherman’s Northern troops in the American Civil War which southerners call The War Between the States. It was within living memory in 1930. Many Britons were to share such an experience in the Second World War, but at least it was at the hands of men from another country.
**** Baylor University, a Baptist Institution, is one of Texas’s leading universities. It was founded in 1845 when Texas was the independent Republic of Texas, not joining the USA until the following year, 1846.
Leave a Reply