Making Hay: I

The Ghosts

2. Ian Hay

Introduction. In his Searchlight Books February 1941 pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn; Socialism and the English Genius, Orwell wrote in Part II Shopkeepers at War that:

Nothing was more desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of 1914-1918 over again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years older with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons. It was like a tea party of ghosts.

The men Orwell named as taking part in this tea party of ghosts were well known to his readers. They are largely forgotten today. In this two part article I look at John Beith Hay who used the pen name Ian Hay.

Orwell and Hay. A Kind of Compulsion. George Orwell first mentioned Ian Hay in a 12 September 1936 Time and Tide review of Percy Bryson Williams’s book In Lightest Africa and Darkest Europe. George Orwell wrote that:

The Other African book of my list “In Lightest Africa and Darkest Europe” is very “light” indeed. It is a facetious account rather in the Ian Hay manner, of the author’s experiences in the British South Africa Police, as a soldier in the Great War, and afterwards as a prospector. I found it tiresome but as all profits from it are to be donated to the British Legion, one can admire the author’s generosity even if one fails to admire his literary style.

On 24 May 1936 The New English Review carried Orwell’s review of Ian Hay’s The Safety Match. George Orwell wrote that:

I shan’t quote from “A Safety Match” but I will quote from the blurb what the late Professor Saintsbury wrote to the author on its publication – “Let me congratulate you on “A Safety Match”. I have read nothing so good for a long time”.

My Italics. Please note that Saintsbury was probably the most widely read man in Europe. This shows what happens to professors of literature when they are so unwise as to write about contemporary books.

A Safety Match was novel first published in 1911 with a play based on it opening at the Strand Theatre in Aldwych in the West End on 13 January 1921; and running for 229 performances until 3 August 1921. This theatre opened in 1905 as the Waldorf, was renamed the Strand in 1909, and the Ivor Novello in 2005.

George Edward Bateman Saintsbury was born in Southampton in 1845. His father George Saintsbury senior was Superintendent of Southampton Docks and then Secretary of the East India and China Association. George Saintsbury junior studied at Merton College, Oxford; became a journalist and editor; was Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Language at Edinburgh University 1895-1915; was a literary historian; was a strong Tory; was married with two sons; and died in 1937 aged ninety one. He was still alive when Orwell called him the late Professor Saintsbury.

A Patriot After All. In his March 1940 Horizon article Boys’ Weeklies Orwell wrote that: It is probable that many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and “advanced” are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood from (for instance) “Sapper” and Ian Hay. “Sapper” was Henry Cyril McNeile, an adventure story writer of Bulldog Drummond fame.

George Orwell wrote in Inside the Whale (11 March 1940): If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War I would sooner have got hold of “Prufrock” than the “First Hundred Thousand” or Horatio Bottomley’s “Letters to the Boys in the Trenches”. “Prufrock” was a poem by T. S. Eliot. Horatio Bottomley was born in 1860; was a politician, muck raking and jingo journalist, and swindler; was convicted of fraud and given a seven year sentence in 1923; and died in 1933.

I have tried to tell the truth. In a 22 September 1944 Tribune article about the novelist Smollett, Orwell wrote that: Tom Jones would fit into a novel by Meredith or for that matter by Ian Hay, whereas Peregrine Pickle seems to belong to a more European background.

Tom Jones was the hero of Henry Fielding a barrister and crime fighting Westminster magistrate’s 1749 novel Tom Jones: or the History of a Foundling. Peregrine Pickle was the anti-hero of Peregrine Pickle a 1751 novel by Tobias George Smollett a Scottish naval surgeon. George Meredith was an English Victorian novelist noted for a convoluted style.

George Orwell’s point is that Smollett had a cruel streak. An eighteenth century naval surgeon would need one. Smollett’s Georgian contemporary Fielding in contrast like most Victorian writers usually rewards virtue and punishes vice.

I belong to the Left. In his article Poetry and the Microphone, probably written in 1943 but published as the third New Saxon Pamphlet in 1945, Orwell discussed his English language literary broadcasting in India earlier in the war. He wrote that:

The ideal from the official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of “safe” people like A. P. Herbert or Ian Hay but, since not enough of these were available, the existing intelligentsia had to be utilised and the tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda have been modified accordingly.

George Orwell wrote in his essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse, written in February 1945 but first published in 1946, that: It is significant that Wodehouse, by nature a writer of farces, was able to collaborate more than once with Ian Hay, a serio-comic writer and an exponent (vide “Pip” etc.) of the “clean living Englishman” tradition at is silliest. Ian Hay and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves fame, had worked together on the plays A Damsel in Distress (1928), Baa Baa Black Sheep (1929) and Leave it to Psmith (1930).

P. G. Wodehouse was detained by the Nazis after France fell. He broadcasted for them and was vilified in Britain. William Joyce i.e. Lord Haw Haw was hanged for broadcasting for the Nazis. Several British citizens served prison terms for this offence. P. G. Wodehouse spent most of the rest of his long life in the USA.

It is What I Think. George Orwell last mentioned Ian Hay in Such Such Were the Joys an article about St Cyprian’s the Prep School Orwell attended 1911-1916. George Orwell writes that: There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour’s undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. So much for Orwell preferring T. S. Eliot to Ian Hay!

Early Life. John Hay Beith was born on 17 April 1876 at Platt Abbey, Rusholme, Ardwick, near Manchester. His parents were John Alexander Beith, a cotton merchant and magistrate, and Janet Beith née Fleming. John Hay Beith was their third son and sixth child.

John studied at Lady Barn House, a Manchester Preparatory School founded in 1873 by a Unitarian; at Fettes College in Edinburgh which was and is Scotland’s leading public school (Tony Blair is a Fettes old boy); and St John’s College, Cambridge. At Fettes he fagged for John Allsebrook Simon (who became a barrister, was ennobled as the 1^st Viscount Simon and was Lord Chancellor 1940-1945. He was unscrupulous even by the standards of lawyers. The scientist J. B. S. Haldane once asked his barrister father Richard Burdon Haldane the 1^st Viscount Haldane of Cloan, who he would want as a defence counsel if he was accused of murder. Richard Burdon Haldane replied that it would depend on the circumstances but if he had done the murder it would most certainly be Sir John Simon.

At Cambridge, John Hay Beith read classics, played rugby, captained his college boat club and in 1898 obtained a Second Class Honours degree. He held temporary teaching posts at Charterhouse, and Fettes, and did some reviewing for the popular press. In 1901 he briefly returned to Cambridge to study science and in 1902 he became a junior science master at Durham School, where he coached the rugby teams and rowing crews. He moved on and from 1906 to 1912 Beith taught at Fettes. He was a resourceful but unconventional teacher, instinctively understood public school boys, and enjoyed teaching.

John Hay Beith’s first novel Pip – a romance of Youth was repeatedly rejected. It was published on a vanity basis in 1907 by Blackwood and Sons. He paid them £50, about £10,000 in our terms to publish it, using the penname Ian Hay in case it flopped. The Daily Telegraph later called it a neat piece of placid middle class humour. It was a best seller and saved its publisher from bankruptcy.

Ian Hay continued writing light hearted novels. Blackwood and Sons published The Right Stuff (1908); A Man’s Man (1909); A Safety March, illustrated by an American artist Frank Graham Cootes (1911); and Happy Go Lucky (1913). Hodder and Stoughton published A Knight on Wheels (1914). Thomas Noble (T. N.) Foulis published The Lighter Side of School Life, illustrated by Lewis (Christopher Edward) Baumer (1914). In 1912 Ian Hay left teaching to be a full time writer – that is the name I shall now use for him.

In 1912 Hay was selected as Prospective Conservative candidate for Kirkcaldy Burghs in Scotland, for the General Election due in 1915. It was cancelled because of the First World War. At the 1918 General Election Ian Hay did not stand against the sitting MP, a Coalition Liberal.

The First World War broke out in August 1914. Despite being thirty-eight and middle-aged Hay, a Fettes Old Boy, was commissioned a Second Lieutenant into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He was one of Kitchener’s First Hundred Thousand. He then transferred to the Machine Gun Corps. In 1915 he was promoted Captain and in 1916 he won the Military Cross.

On 19 January 1915 John Hay Beith, to use his proper name, thirty eight, an author and Machine Gun Corps officer, married Helen Margaret Speirs, twenty seven at St Pauls Anglican Church, Knightsbridge, in London. The marriage was childless.

Helen Margaret Speirs’s father Peter Alexander Speirs was born in Cawnpore in India in 1842, became an advocate i.e. a Scottish lawyer, married Florence Cooke in 1880, produced three children, was Advocate Sheriff Substitute for Roxburghshire and Berwickshire, and died in 1907, aged sixty five.

The First Hundred Thousand. In 1915 William Blackwood and Sons published Ian Hay’s most famous book The First Hundred Thousand, Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K (1)”. It was based on articles he had had published in Blackwood’s Journal. He cautioned readers against believing it was an official history. He called his unit the Bruce and Wallace Highlanders and gave his characters made up names; but assured readers that every incident described happened.

The book contains some sharp satire. In his opening chapter he claims that two NCOs commanding platoons appear to have retired from active service about the time that bows and arrows began to yield place to the arquebus. He vividly describes the awful conditions the men endured in hurriedly built camps in England in winter 1914-1915 before they went to France; and the chaotic War Office bureaucracy.

The Quartermaster General of the British Army in the First World War, John Steven Cowans, a Carlisle industrialist’s son, was a very capable officer, but his office was massively strained by the rapid expansion of the army in a few months. In peacetime the War Office was reasonably efficient but its workload massively increased in 1914.

There are realistic descriptions of Western Front trench life. Weary Brigadier Generals explained to their officers and men that much of what they had learnt in military textbooks was obsolete. For instance, one should not build trenches in places with too good a field of fire or one would be shelled out of them. Nor should one take cover in large buildings, behind railway embankments or anywhere likely to appear on large scale maps. German artillery was deadly accurate, especially when its gunners could precisely calculate range.

This was the type of realism the British military hierarchy appreciated. They did not want writing about the war to be too graphic in portraying its worst horrors; but they did not appreciate romantic rubbish either. In Part Two of this article I will look at Ian Hay’s later life.

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