Orwell and the Neo-Tories: II

Part Two of Orwell and the Neo-Tories

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Introduction. In his article “Notes on Nationalism” (Polemic, October 1945) 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 is 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 part one of my article I briefly looked at the people Orwell names in the first sentence, at the Tory Reform Committee; and at the two journals he names. Here I briefly look at those he names in the final sentence of this quote, except for Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (his career and relations with Orwell are worth a separate article).

T. S. Eliot. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri. His father was an industrialist. T. S. Eliot’s parents came from old New England puritan families. He studied at Harvard but felt out of place. New Englanders saw him as a southerner and southerners as a Yankee.

After graduating Eliot moved to Paris where he was attracted by the Monarchist, Classicist and Catholic writer Charles Maurras. T. S. Eliot returned to Harvard in 1911 to do a thesis on Henri Louis Bergson’s neo idealist critic Francis Herbert Bradley; and produced a philosophical critique of consciousness.

T. S. Eliot moved to Germany in 1914 but left for England after war began. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh Wood. She was physically and mentally ill and an opiate addict. He taught, lectured and reviewed; and was a Lloyd’s Bank clerk from 1917 to 1925 when he was appointed literary editor and a director of the publisher Faber. He became a British citizen and an Anglican in 1927. In 1928 he declared himself a literary classicist, a political royalist and an Anglo-Catholic i.e. a High Church Anglican. He was a church-warden at St Stephen’s Church in Kensington.

T. S. Eliot was one of Britain’s leading twentieth century poets and dramatist. His poetry ranged from the very obscure and depressing such as The Wasteland (1922) and Sweeney Agonistes (1926-1927), to the very accessible such as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). His plays included Murder in the Cathedral (1935) about Thomas Beckett.

In 1938 T. S. Eliot had his wife committed to a mental hospital. During the Second World War he was a London air raid warden. He continued writing. He had moved from pessimistic disillusionment to Christian redemption. His wife died in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

T. S. Eliot died on 4 January 1965 aged seventy six. His remains were cremated. After a Westminster Abbey funeral service they were buried in East Coker in Somerset which his ancestor Andrew Eliot had left for New England in the 1660’s to escape the restored monarchy and High Church Anglicanism.

George Orwell wrote about T. S. Eliot elsewhere notably in Inside the Whale. T. S. Eliot was never anything but a Tory. His mentor Charles Maurras supported the French royalist Action Francaise, collaborated with the Nazis; was given a life sentence in 1945 after the liberation; and was released shortly before his death in 1952 aged eighty four.

Hugh Kingsmill Lunn known as Hugh Kingsmill was born in London on 21 November 1889 the son of Sir Henry Simpson Lunn, a travel agency founder and pioneer of ski holidays; he studied at Harrow, New College Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin; and worked as a journalist for James Thomas (Frank) Harris on the journal Hearth and Home.

Hugh Kingsmill joined the Royal Navy in 1914. In 1915 he married Eileen Fitzgerald. They were to have one daughter. In 1916 he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Division and went to France where he was captured by the Germans in 1917. He spent the rest of the war a POW.

From 1921 to 1927 Hugh Kingsmill worked for his father in Lucerne and wrote novels. In 1927 Hugh’s wife sued him for divorce and in 1932 the divorce was made absolute. He had set up house with Dorothy Vernon. When they met she already had a son. Their first child was born in Geneva in 1930. They married in 1934 and produced two more children.

 Kingsmill became a novelist, biographer, humourist and essayist known for brilliant writing but often rushed endings. His book Behind Both Lines about his war experiences was published by Mitchell and Morley Kennerley of London in 1930. He was literary editor of Punch 1942-1944 and editor of the Tory New English Review 1945 to 1949. He died of cancer in 1949, aged fifty nine.

Hugh Kingsmill should not be confused with his older brother the journalist, skier and Christian theologian Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn; or their younger brother the writer and translator Brian Holdsworth Lunn whose wife was the translator Beatrix Elinor Amoret Lunn nee Duncan.

On 23 April 1944 the Observer published Orwell’s review of Hugh Kingsmill’s book The Poisoned Crown. On 18 July 1948 it printed Orwell’s review of Kingsmill’s book The Dawn’s Delay. George Orwell admired Kingsmill’s writing but disagreed with him politically.

Hugh Kingsmill believed that all Utopian plans fail and create hells. He was against all reformers, believed that Christianity was the only answer and that even material progress was impossible. George Orwell pointed out that not all reformers were Utopians; and that if material progress were impossible we would still be in the Stone Age. As Orwell knew from Spain the devil can wear a crucifix to quote a modern hymn.

On 15 May 1949 The New York Times Book Review printed Orwell’s review of Edward Hesketh Gibbons Pearson’s Dickens: His Character, Comedy and Career. Orwell mentions several such books and writes that Kingsmill’s The Sentimental Journey: a life of Charles Dickens (Wishart & Co. 1934) is perhaps the most brilliant ever written on Dickens; but it is so unremittingly “against” that it might give a misleading impression.

Wyndham Lewis. Llewelyn Bevan Wyndham Lewis was born on 9 March 1891 in Lancashire a pharmacist’s son; studied at Cardiff Intermediate School; joined the 11^th Welsh Regiment (the Cardiff Pals) as a private on 1 September 1914; served in France where he was twice shell shocked and in Macedonia where he caught malaria; and was demobilised, still a private, in 1918. On 29 October 1918 he married Winifred Mary Jane Holland. They had one daughter the actress Angela Wyndham Lewis.

Wyndham Lewis joined the Daily Express in 1919. He wrote it’s By the Way column for some years, being the first Beachcomber. In 1921 he became a Catholic and in 1926 he and his wife divorced. He wrote the Daily Mail column, At the Sign of the Blue Moon from 1926-1930; and was the News Chronicle’s Timothy Shy. Orwell mentioned Timothy Shy in his article about Jonathan Swift “Politics vs Literature” (Polemic, September 1946).

Wyndham Lewis was a prolific humourist and biographer with a strong Catholic bias. He and a group of fellow Catholic writers met regularly between the wars at Shirreff’s Wine Bar under Ludgate Circus in London. According to the Dictionary of National Biography he liked wine, France, Spain, the Pyrenees, Elgar and tradition; and hated financiers, socialists, blue stockings (i.e. intellectual women), officials and novelty.

In 1933 Wyndham Lewis married Dorothy Anne Robertson in a civil ceremony. They were to have two sons. His last book a biography of the Spanish artist Goya was published in 1968. He died in Spain on 21 November 1969 aged seventy eight.

Wyndham Lewis was a political Catholic and calling him a Neo-Tory is rather dubious. Hating financiers can be a sign of anti-Semitic attitudes. As Orwell said political Catholics and Neo-Tories were often prone to such feelings.

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was born on 24 March 1903 in Croydon. His father Henry Thomas Benjamin Muggeridge was a City of London businessman, Socialist, and Croydon Borough Councillor, who was the Labour MP for Romford from 1929 to 1931.

Malcolm Muggeridge studied at Selhurst Grammar and Selwyn College Cambridge, getting a pass degree in natural science. He became a Christian and from 1925 to 1927 taught at Alwaye Christian College near Madras.

In 1927 Muggeridge returned to Britain, began supply teaching in Birmingham and married Katherine (Kitty) Rosalind Dobbs. They were to have four children. From 1927 to 1930 he taught English at Cairo University and reported on Egypt for the Guardian. In 1930 he returned to England and he became a Guardian leader writer.

Like many socialists between the wars the Muggeridges idolised Russia and in September 1932 they went to live there. They were disillusioned and he was one of the few western journalists to report the famine caused by brutal, badly planned, and worse implemented agricultural policies. They left Russia and after working for the League of Nations in Switzerland in 1934 he briefly worked for the Calcutta Statesman and then the London Evening Standard.

In 1936 encouraged by his friend Hugh Kingsmill M Muggeridge became a full time writer of novels, biographies and social surveys. In 1940 he joined MI6 spying in Mozambique, North Africa, Italy and France. He protected P. G. Wodehouse who was suspected of being a German agent for having made foolish but innocuous broadcasts for the Germans.

In 1945 Malcolm Muggeridge became a Daily Telegraph leader writer. In 1946 he was appointed its Washington correspondent and from 1950 to 1952 he was its Deputy Editor. From 1952 to 1957 he edited Punch.

In 1957 Muggeridge joined the BBC and presented many TV programmes including Panorama. In late 1957 it briefly suspended him for publishing in an American journal an article attacking the cult of monarchy. He was a strong public advocate of Christianity; became a Catholic in 1982; and introduced Mother Teresa to a world-wide audience. He died of bronchopneumonia on 14 November 1990 at Hastings aged eighty seven.

Malcolm Muggeridge and Orwell were friends. George Orwell reviewed Muggeridge’s book The Thirties (Hamish Hamilton, 1940), a social survey, in “Notes on the Way”, published in two parts in Time and Tide magazine on 30 March-6 April 1940. Orwell thought it was a brilliant and depressing book.

Richard Lance Keeble’s article “Orwell and the Important Muggeridge Archive Revelations” (George Orwell Studies, 2021) discusses the friendship of Orwell’s and Muggeridg  and how Muggeridge planned to write an Orwell biography at Sonia Orwell’s request. Muggeridge began work one but it clashed with his other commitments. Wheaton College near Chicago preserves the Muggeridge archive.

Frederick Augustus Voigt was born on 9 May 1892 in Hampstead, London. His father was a German wine merchant. Frederick Augustus (F.A.) Voigt studied at Haberdashers’ Aske School in Hampstead and the University of London getting a first class modern languages degree in 1915. In 1916 he was conscripted into the British Army. He served for three years including two years on the Western Front.

F. A. Voigt was demobilized in 1919 and joined the Guardian. In 1920 Swarthmore Press published his book Combed Out about his war service; and he became a Guardian reporter in Germany. He reported on the 1920 Ruhr communist uprising; German and Soviet Russian military co-operation; Polish repression in the Western Ukraine; and the Nazi threat to civilization. In January 1933, shortly before the Nazis came to power, he moved to Paris. In 1934 he returned to England and became the Guardian diplomatic correspondent.

In 1938 Voigt was appointed editor of the Tory journal The Nineteenth Century and After, though remaining a Guardian reporter. In 1940 he left the Guardian to be German adviser to the British Army Psychological Warfare Department.

F. A. Voigt started out as a left winger but was disillusioned by the alleged lack of resistance by the German left to the Nazis. He came to see Marxism and Nazism as rival evils; and became a Tory, a strong Christian and supported the British Empire which he saw as indispensable for world peace a view expounded in his book Pax Britannica (Constable, 1949). He was married three times, divorced twice and had one daughter. He died on 7 January 1957 aged sixty-four.

In fact, the German left heroically resisted the Nazis, first on the streets before the Nazis came to power, and then in the underground movement. The Nazis executed, murdered by death squads or done to death in concentration camps, tens of thousands of German communists and social democrats. Four thousand Germans served in the Ernst Thaelmann Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War despite ferocious Nazi reprisals against their families.