The Red Priest and the Architect

It might perhaps be guessed that Conrad Noel (1869 - 1942), the 'Red Priest' of Thaxted, whose Socialist views once outraged the Tory faithful of his North Essex parish, would be sympathetic to the Art and Craft movement, whose guru was the Socialist poet and designer William Morris. But an inscription, dated April 1906, in a copy of The Country Cottage, presented to him from its co-author, George Llewellyn Morris, confirms it.

Amazingly, I found this inscribed copy of the little book, a hymn to the virtues of both the humble thatched labourer’s cottage and its much more sophisticated Arts and Crafts imitations in brick, plaster and tile, profusely depicted in photographs, in 2006 among the trashy novels in the ten pence box outside a well known bookshop in Saffron Walden. The book had been given to Noel four years before he became Vicar of Thaxted, and it had somehow found its way from here to that bookshop, just 12 miles away, in the intervening years.

The only facts that can be discovered about George Llewellyn Morris

The 25 most beautiful words

A press cutting from an American newspaper from 1911  found in an old lexicon. It reads:

A contest to decide the twenty-five most beautiful words in the English language, conducted by the West Fifty-seventh street Branch of the Y. M. C. A., this week was won by John Shea, a lawyer, of 416 Broadway. The prize was a flexible leather standard student's dictionary. Twenty-one of the twenty-five words submitted by Mr. Shea were accepted. "The words accepted are melody, splendor, adoration, eloquence, virtue, innocence, modesty, faith, joy, honor, radiance, nobility, sympathy, heaven, love, divine, hope, harmony, happiness, purity and liberty. Three of the words rejected were grace, justice and truth. 

This story seems to have been syndicated as another paper of the time explains that 'grace' and 'justice' were stricken out because of the harshness of the 'g' in grace and the 'j' in  justice and the word truth was eliminated because of its metallic sound.100 years later in a less religion centred world it would be a different list - love and happiness, heaven, hope and liberty might still make it…(also truth and justice might be allowed back.) However melody, splendor, adoration, eloquence, virtue, innocence, modesty, faith, honor, radiance, nobility, sympathy,divine,  harmony and purity might not..

An unpublished Titanic poem (May 1912)

Found among a lot of miscellaneous papers, some religious - this poem by one William Allen about the Titanic disaster. It is dated May 1912, one month after the tragedy. The name William Allen is associated with the Titanic because it was the name of the father of one of the survivors, Ada E. Hall. The family was from Hackney, London and Ada was emigrating to America (along with her brother in law the Reverend Bateman who drowned*). She is in the Encyclopedia Titanica and in a lengthy article on her in the  Baltimore Sun it states: "Nearer My God to Thee" was the last song Ada heard from the band that was playing on the deck of the RMS Titanic after she boarded a lifeboat and was lowered to the waters below." This hymn is mentioned in the poem and there are a few details that may have come from an eyewitness (i.e. his daughter) rather than from press reports. William Allen is a common name so none of this is conclusive. The poem is heartfelt, competent and deeply religious:

T'was the eve of the day of rest
That the mighty Leviathan
Ploughed her way through the ocean's
Sleeping breast.

List  to the throb of her stately tread
Mark her proportions
From anchor to lofty head
Its harmony sublime.

Talking Beast 3

The final part of Richard Ince's Talking Beast. A candid inquiry into the nature of homo vulgaris. (London: W. Hodge & Co., 1944.) It is a heartfelt and still interesting polemic from the 1940s. Ince acknowledges as his inspiration (and mentor) Archibald Weir, the Buddha of Marley Common:
 "...it might be supposed that I am a disciple of Archibald Weir.. I am a disciple of no one, preferring to seek truth wherever I discern it. In the East they have a saying: "Where there is no Buddha hurry on, and where there is a Buddha, do not linger." The paradox would certainly have been approved by Weir, who wrote: "I do not seek to formulate tenets or to make disciples. The intent of these books would be frustrated entirely if any such success were obtained among their readers. All that I can wish to offer is assistance to earnest minds in the effort to think for themselves...'

Having found a signed and jacketed copy (at a sadly low price) we can reprint the blurb from the inside flap and also a press-cutting pasted to the rear endpaper. This review from The Field leads one to think this may have been Ince's own copy and the book was reviewed by this horsey magazine because it was about an animal...

Inside d/w flap reads:

Our present world is not, for many, a pleasant place in which to live. The conditions force even the least thoughtful to consider why they are here. People ask: Has western civilisation failed? Has Christianity failed? Is there hope in the Churches? In religion? And, if so, of what kind? Only a fool or a knave could be satisfied with things as they are. Only a fool or a knave could imagine that outbreaks of hatred and the competitive spirit could bring peace or satisfaction. This book by an author who has thought deeply and experienced deeply looks without prejudice or ready-made opinion on the content of our consciousness as it exists today. He has attained a philosophy which brings order out of chaos and a measure of peace out of strife and muddle. 
If you are not satisfied with the world as it appears to you and believe there are better possibilities for every one, you should read TALKING BEAST. It will help you to face bedrock facts, no matter how ugly, with courage and cheerfulness. 

The press-cutting reads:

International Press-Cutting Bureau - London. THE FIELD.
11 November 1944.

'Talking Beast' by Richard Ince.

This is a book, as arresting as its title, which is better read twice than once. It will produce both acceptance and antagonism, according to the reader's mental progress from talking beast to mature human.

The year 1975 in prophecy

If you ignore the boils, this could be a scene from any number of war zones around the world today. But it isn’t. It’s the vision of destruction that Mad Magazine cartoonist Max Wolverton has conjured up after having read the blistering anti-technology rant of American Radio evangelist Herbert W Armstrong entitled 1975 in Prophecy. 

This pamphlet of some 32 pages contains other examples of Wolverton’s artwork, including a rather chilling reminder of 9/11 in which bodies are shown falling from a cliff to their deaths. There are also photographs of the technological miracle that was post-war West Germany—all to show how the 'fantastic push button world' brought to us by scientists and technologists was likely to turn us into a 'western world of soft degenerates, irresponsible, immoral, sick of mind and diseased of body’  prey to a take-over by Communism, and even, more absurdly, Neonazism.

Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, argues that the Almighty  doesn’t really approve of all this progress nonsense and will take his retribution in 1975 (a handy borrowing by Armstrong of the number- switching method by which Orwell turned 1948 to 1984), bringing plagues, earthquakes, flooding, etc to a world that was too obsessed with bringing about a life of leisure to care much about worshipping the Creator.

If we think this hysteria was over the top consider the date 1956—it was the height of the Cold War, Stalin’s salt mines and death camps were still around, and then ramifications of McCarthysim were still rife in Hollywood. In the 1951 film The Day the World Stood Still, where a robot from another world arrives to warn of a threat to Mankind, the anti-Communist, anti-technology message is more nuanced, but powerful all the same.

Armstrong was playing on these fears, but it is impossible to say whether or not he truly believed his own dire prophecies. What we do know, however, is that his Radio Church of God grew rich on the donations sent in by not very bright listeners.

And though he was way out on most of his speculations on future technology -- private helicopters taking the place of cars for many, baths where ‘supersonic waves took the place of water, and air passengers travelling by rocket--Armstrong proved prescient on a few things. When he predicts that 'food is to be cooked by heat waves' he looks forward to microwave ovens; and the telephones that he claims will show an image of the person being called have existed for a number of years.

Talking Beast. A Candid Enquiry..Part 1

Found - a fascinating book by a forgotten writer, Richard Ince (1881 to circa 1960). Although the author of 20+ books he has no Wikipedia page and there is not a lot about him on the web. He mainly looks up through his sister Gertrude's fortunate marriage into the engineering/ industrial dynasty De Ferranti. With her he edited her late husband's papers - The Life and Letters of Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (Williams & Norgate London, 1934). He wrote novels,humorous works, biographies etc., One of his books, a collection of stories from 1926 At the Sign of Sagittarius, makes into Bleiler's Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction. The work we have scanned Talking Beast (Hodge & Co, London 1944) is a sort of self-help slightly ranting philosophical/ religious polemic, of its time with some ideas now unpalatable but a bold, fresh  work. The title comes from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia 'This Man, this Talking Beast, this Walking Tree.' Here are the first 3 chapters...

TALKING BEAST

A CANDID INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE

OF

HOMO VULGARIS

BY

RICHARD INCE

"A shop of shame, a book where blots be rife
   This body is . . .    
   This Man, this Talking Beast, this Walking Tree"

-Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

"To thine own Self be true
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man"

–Hamlet (1, 3, 78)

LONDON          EDINBURGH          GLASCOW

WILLIAM HODGE AND COMPANY LIMITED

1944

DEDICATION

To the memory of Archibald Weir,

to whose life and writings I owe so

much; in the hope that I have not

in this collaboration too seriously

misinterpreted the essence of his vital

message

PREFACE

  This book, written during the years of war seems to me have a pertinent bearing on the conditions of our time. It does not deal directly with reconstruction in the political, or religious spheres, although, I imagine, the unprejudiced reader will come from its disquieting awareness of what is and what be. • It is not concerned with any rearrangement of goods in the market place. It is surely the men and women who stand behind the booths that should claim attention. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, wrote Wordsworth. Life is larger than any religion, any philosophy, any science. And the only experience we can have of life is that which our own consciousness, feeble and flickering, brings to us. All I ask

The Air of Bloomsbury 2

The second part of an illuminating article found in a Times Literary Supplement from 1954 - a very lengthy anonymous review of J.K. Johnstone's The Bloomsbury Group. This part is good on the religious philosophy of the group and what gave them such strength and separateness. As the author says they enjoyed "..supreme self-confidence, superiority and contempt towards all the rest of the unconverted world." The Maharishi to the set was G.E. Moore and his Principia Ethica is still much in demand.

THE AIR OF BLOOMSBURY

…still they were hardly a group, Mr. Bell maintains. Yes, they met often and were intimate friends. Yes, they did like each other; also they shared a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling. But, he asks, is there anything specific in this? Could not as much be said of many collections of young people in many ages? Here Virginia Woolf seems to chime in with him. ln Jacob's Room there is a tenderly mocking glimpse of her
hero as he sits reading in the British Museum. And Jacob surely suggests an early Bloomsbury figure ? Indeed, from the fleeting touches which convey so well the effect of his presence, those who can remember her brother Thoby,and a certain hewn grandeur in his appearance, are tempted to read him back into Jacob, thus giving Jacob an independent existence, which her characters rarely possess in their own right. "Life on the page," says Mr. Forster, she could always give her characters, "but rarely life eternal..She could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account as Emma is remembered for
instance ... "

..All the same, Mr.Johnstone succeeds in showing that when they happened to live in Bloomsbury they shared a common mystique, which really does entitle him to call them a group. But still Mr. Bell will not have it. "..Undoubtedly the Bloomsbury mind was permeated by what Keynes called "the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica. And what were they? A reviewer can only extract unmethodically a few relevant passages from Mr. Johnstone's able summary.

Philip Oyler (the mage Trelawney)

Philip Oyler (1880 - 1973) Writer, poet, farmer, religious thinker and the acknowledged original (with Aleister Crowley) of the character Dr. Trelawney in Anthony Powell's 12 volume The Music of Time.

A work from 1960. Later in life he seems to have become a fairly conventional Christian with anti-urban pastoral yearnings.

Leaves from the Tree of Life or Fruits of Experience.

A few quotations:

In the way of God it is not necessary to read or write. What is of paramount importance is that we should at all times listen most attentively to the promptings of conscience, the small sweet Voice that tells us quite clearly when we ignore it. Study  of the scriptures or any eloquent sermon will avail nought unless we listen to that Voice.

Giving a toy to a baby is the way to make a baby look outside himself for happiness. Babies show their contempt for it by throwing it away, but fond parents pick it up again!

Only the poor know how to give for they know what it means to lack.

If we cannot be content with a little, we will not be content with a lot either. It is not the quantity but the outlook which is the deciding factor.

Anti-city, pro-country sentiments -'man creeps about in his cities, ignoring his destiny and his duty, blinded by the worship of self to such an extent that he does not know why he has been born.His brain is swollen; his heart shrivelled up...God help us!

Bookride notes '...Oyler went on to live a long life as an educationalist, Utopian, 'New Lifer', country writer and 'Prophet of the Soil.' ... Tim D'Arch Smith, in the revised edition of his excellent work 'The Books of the Beast' has a chapter on Dr. Trelawney ('thaumaturge and seer')

I Was a Beatnik

From a Christian book We Found our Way Out by James R. Adair and Ted Miller (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids Michigan 1965.) People tell their stories 'of how God led them from the confusion of false religions and philosophies to a life of peace in Jesus...a first hand glimpse into many heresies.' The Beatnik chapter gives an insight into a vanished world. Others escaped from communism, Armstrongism, Satan and Theosophism...many other contemporary portrayals of Beatniks have them as followers of Eastern religions.

I Was a Beatnik

  The day I turned twenty I thought I knew all there was to know about life. Yet the kind of life I was wrapped up in was filled with idle conversation, liquor, and pep pills.
  I was living piecemeal by doing commercial art off and on. Most of the time I sat around in the back booth of a dark little tavern and played things "cool," beatnik-style.
  I was fairly proud of that title "beatnik." I read a lot of philosophy, looking desperately for something on which to hang the threads of my life. Nights I wandered aimlessly to my noisy beat retreat and sat. There I would stay with my little clan of beatniks until the wee hours of the morning, locking hornrims over some discussion subject and working it to death.
  I was getting fed up with life, which seemed so cheap. And I was sick of trying to look "way-out." I felt I had gone to "Nowheresville," that I was too tired and too old and oh, so weary. I hated myself.
  One night after I got back to my room from the tavern, I stretched on the floor and looked over my books to find one I thought would be light reading. I decided on Early Will I Seek Thee, by Eugenia Price.
  At first the book's literary style captivated my attention. It was sheer simplicity. I turned on one of my very, very blue jazz records and began to read the style–not the message.

  After I had scanned the book, the record ended and the needle was scratching its way back and forth. I picked up the needle, turned off the machine and sat foggy-eyed and unthinking for quite some time. Then I started the book again on the first page. This time I read the message.