Orwell and the Neo-Tories: I

Introduction. In his article “Notes on Nationalism” (Polemic, October 1945) George Orwell writes about what he calls Neo-Toryism. It was, he writes:

Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A. P. Herbert, G. M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as ‘The New English Review’ and the ‘Nineteenth Century and After’. The real motive force of Neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character, and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All Neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed though the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The Anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who exhibit this tendency are F.A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

In this, Part One of my article, I briefly look at the people Orwell names in the first sentence; at the Tory Reform Committee; and at the two journals he names. In Part Two I will briefly look at those he names in the final sentence of this quote.

Lord Elton. Godfrey Elton was born at Sherington in Buckinghamshire on 29 March 1892; studied at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford; and in September 1914 was commissioned into the 4th Hampshire Regiment. He served in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and was captured by the Turks at Kut in 1916 becoming a POW.

In 1919 Queen’s College, Oxford, made Elton a Fellow and he taught modern history there. In 1921 he married a Norwegian woman. They were to have three children. He was a good tutor and a firm disciplinarian with old fashioned ideas about men and women students getting too friendly. His book The Revolutionary Idea in France 1789-1878 (1923) was reprinted several times.

Godfrey Elton was the unsuccessful Thornbury, Gloucestershire, Labour candidate in 1924 and 1929. In 1931 he followed the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald out of the Labour Party into the National Labour Party which joined the Tories and Liberals in the coalition National Government. Elton admired Macdonald and had taught Macdonald’s son Malcolm at Queen’s College.

In 1934 Ramsay MacDonald the National Government Premier got Elton made the 1st Baron Elton. Lord Elton wrote volume one of a biography of Macdonald; and after Macdonald died Elton wrote Macdonald’s Dictionary of National Biography supplement entry.

Lord Elton often spoke in the House of Lords on the environment, agriculture, broadcasting and religion; was a staunch Anglican; served on many committees; made BBC radio broadcasts; and wrote several more books including novels. He died on 18 April 1973 aged eighty one. A former Labour man he had become more Tory than the Tories.

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert. Alan Patrick (A. P.) Herbert was born at Leatherhead in Surrey on 24 September 1890 the son (like Orwell!) of an India Office official; studied at Winchester and New College, Oxford; and in 1914 got a first in law. In August 1914 he joined the Royal Navy as an ordinary sailor and in December 1914 he married Gwendoline Harriet Quilter. They were to have four children.

In March 1915 A. P. Herbert was commissioned into the Royal Naval Division and he served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. He was wounded and invalided home in 1917. While recovering he wrote a novel The Secret Battle about a Gallipoli soldier who was shell shocked and was executed for alleged cowardice. In 1918 A. P. Herbert was called to the bar at the Inner Temple but he did not practise.

A. P. Herbert joined the staff of humour magazine Punch in 1924. He specialised in legal satire; and wrote operettas and other works. His 1934 novel Holy Deadlock satirised the divorce law.

In 1935 A. P. Herbert was elected an Independent Oxford University MP. He was knighted in 1945 and held the seat until 1950 when university seats were abolished. He got the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act passed. It widened the grounds for divorce to include unlawful desertion, cruelty, incurable insanity, incest and anal sex. From 1857 to 1937 adultery was the only legal ground for divorce. In 1940 he successfully opposed plans to impose purchase tax on books.

During the Second World War he served in the River Thames Emergency Service. He continued writing. Even after his parliamentary seat was abolished he campaigned on causes including Public Lending Right; copyright; and the obscenity laws which he helped change so that books were considered as a whole not on passages taken out of context.

Sir A. P. Herbert died on 11 November 1971 aged eighty one. I do not know if he and Orwell ever met but I am sure that politics aside they would have respected each other.

Professor Kenneth William Murray Pickthorn He was born on 23 April 1892 the son of Charles Wright Pickthorn a Master Mariner; and was educated at Aldenham and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he got a first in history. In 1914 he was elected a Fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, a Tory stronghold. In the First World War he served in the infantry and the Royal Flying Corps in in France and Macedonia. After being badly wounded he worked in the War Office Propaganda Department.

Professor Pickthorn returned to teaching at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and was an expert on the British Constitution, and the Tudors. One of his colleagues there was Richard Austen (Rab) Butler a prominent Conservative. From 1935 to 1950 Pickthorn was a Cambridge University Conservative MP; and from 1950 to 1966 when he retired, he sat for Carlton, a working class Nottinghamshire, seat.

Professor Pickthorn was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education from 1951 to 1954. He did not shine in government for he disliked bureaucratic routine. His real forte was as a debater and intellectual who supported unpopular ideas. He was given a baronetcy i.e. a hereditary knighthood in 1959. He was married with three children. He died on Wednesday 12 November 1975 aged eighty three.

In his 17 November 1944 “As I Please” (Tribune) column Orwell reviewed Pickthorn’s pamphlet Principles or Prejudices. Signpost Booklets a Tory publisher had published it. Orwell called him one of the more intelligent of the younger Tory MPs (‘younger’ in political circles means under sixty); accused him of lying to appeal to the ignorant; says that fortunately Mr Pickthorn writes too badly to have a broad appeal; that some of the other writers in this series were more level headed; and ends that when Tories grow intelligent it is time to feel for your watch and count your small change.

L. J. Hurst, editor of this website, on 3 February 2019, posted an article titled Pickthorn’s Principles. Here I have given a little information about who Pickthorn was.

George Malcolm (G. M.) Young He was born on 29 April 1882 at Charlton in Kent the son of George Frederick Young a Greenhithe Steamer Master; and studied at St Paul’s School and Balliol College, Oxford where he got a first in classics and was a keen rower. After briefly teaching at St John’s College, Oxford, he worked for the Board of Education i.e. the Civil Service.

In 1917 G. M. Young as Secretary of the new and short lived Ministry of Reconstruction accompanied the Labour War Cabinet member and future Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson, on a visit to Russia. This turned Young into an opponent of Bolshevism and a strong Conservative. After the war he visited Vienna and was briefly a director of the Anglo-Austrian Bank.

G M. Young left the civil service in 1919 and devoted himself to historical writing becoming a leading expert on the Victorians. He wrote about other periods too such as the English Civil War. He lived at his Wiltshire country home with the former social worker and civil servant turned historian and literary biographer Mona Wilson. She was ten years older than him. There was no question of children so they never married. They both sat on various public boards and committees.

Mona Wilson died in 1954 aged 82. G. M. Young sold his home. He had been elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1948 and he returned to Oxford. To quote the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography his mind became clouded and he died in an Oxfordshire nursing home on 18 November 1959 aged seventy seven. He left £24, 435 10s 3d.

The Tory Reform Committee was a group of some forty to fifty Tory backbenchers that operated between 1942 and 1947. They opposed the laissez faire free market with a minimal safety net that was Tory policy between the two World Wars; and Socialist plans for nationalisations and a planned economy. Instead they supported a mixed economy. They claimed to be returning to the one nation politics of Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian Tory novelist and Prime Minister.

The Tory Reformers made little short term political impact. During the Second World War there was a coalition government but the Tory majority over the other parties was so large that forty to fifty Tories opposing government policy did not matter. The 1945- 1950 Labour government majority was so large that it could ignore the opposition parties.

The Tory Reform Committee employed researchers and published papers. Its history is analysed in Gary Love’s September 2020 English Historical Review article. He made little reference to its foreign and imperial policy; and focused on its economic policy and its attempts to find a middle way between what we call Thatcherism and the totalitarian state.

I found one reference to the Tory Reform Committee’s imperial policy in Gary Love’s article. In a pamphlet it published in January 1945 titled Tools for the Next Job: A Policy of Progress through Productivity, it was stated that the British government should promote colonial development; and co-operate with the British Dominions to develop the Empire as a joint enterprise of free and equal partners. In 1945 all the big three British political parties supported the continuation of the British Empire.

Neither Tory nor Labour Leaders wanted Indian independence in 1947. Their hand was forced by Indian Nationalism. The Tory governments between 1951 and 1964 could afford one nation policies but joint American and Russian action over Suez in 1956 doomed the British Empire. Once it was gone one nation Toryism was doomed.

The New English Review was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode between 1945 and 1949. It replaced Home and Empire that was published by that company from 1930 to 1939. In 1949 it merged with the National Review a hard-right Tory magazine founded in 1883. As the National and English Review it operated until 1960 by which time the British Empire was clearly doomed.

The Nineteenth Century was a journal founded in 1872. In 1901 It was renamed The Nineteenth Century and After. It was renamed The Twentieth Century in 1951. It started by publishing articles from various political viewpoints but in the twentieth century it became firmly Tory before it closed in 1968. By then the British Empire was history.

In 1945 when Orwell wrote “Notes on Nationalism” the editor of The Nineteenth Century and After, Frederick Augustus Voigt, opposed Marxism and Nazism; and was a Tory, a strong Christian and supported the British Empire which he saw as indispensable for world peace. The British Empire went where all indispensable people go. The graveyards are full of them.

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