William Loring, academic, soldier and first Warden of Goldsmiths

Found among  the papers of the long defunct literary agency Michael Hayes of Cromwell Road S.W.5  - parts of a manuscript memoir by one L.R. Reeve of Newton Abbot, South Devon. Mr Reeve was attempting to get the book (Among those Present: Very Exceptional People) published, but on the evidence of the unused stamp Hayes never replied and  L. R. Reeve published the book himself through the esteemed vanity publisher Stockwell two years later in 1974.

L R Reeve had in a long life met or observed a remarkable selection of famous persons. He  presents 'vignettes' of 110 persons from all grades of society (many minor or even unknown) they include Winston Churchill, Dorothy Sayers,  H H Asquith, John Buchan, the cricketer Jack Hobbs, J.B. Priestley, H.G. Wells, Marconi, E.M. Forster, Duchess of Atholl, Marie Stopes, Oliver Lodge and Cecil Sharp -- 'it is unnecessary to explain that  many I have known have not known me. All of them I have seen, most of them I have heard, and some of them have sought information, even advice from me."

The Tragedy of Copped Hall

The effects of the First World War were wide and long lasting, not just for those who were directly involved in it, one way or another , but for the architectural heritage of Britain. The deaths of so many sons of the upper class meant that estates that had been run so successfully up to 1914 were plunged into uncertainty. Great mansions were sold off or demolished. A different fate befell one great house and its astonishing gardens in Essex, as some clippings found among the papers of the late Peter Haining, who must have passed the site regularly on his route to and from his Essex home, tell.

Today, for those driving clockwise along the M25 the roofless ruins of Copped Hall, situated on the edge of woodland just south-east of Epping, are an intriguing sight. For most of the War the mansion, which had replaced a more interesting Elizabethan house and gardens in 1753, was a cherished family home. The elaborate gardens, a late Victorian theatrical tour de force by C.E Kempe, better known for his stained glass designs, were remarkable enough to feature in a lengthy article in Country Life in 1910. But seven years later, on one night in November 1917 all was to change.

Wilfred Owen - 'A Cribber'?

Has it ever been acknowledged that the memorable and now iconic line of Wilfred Owen- ‘the pity of war’ is actually the title of a novel from 1906, that happened to be written by his close friend and fellow soldier-combatant Conal O’Riordan?!
The Pity of War. F. Norreys Connell ( i.e. Conal O’Riordan) 1906. Henry J Glaisher, London. [Sent in by ATSJ - for which thanks]

W.H.R.Rivers

Sometimes now known as 'The Psychiatrist of The Ghost Road' W.H.R.Rivers has a formidable reputation and holds a pivotal place in the development of neurophysiology, psychiatry/ psychology and anthropology - but he is probably most widely known for his wartime association with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves and is featured in Pat Barker's 1995 Booker prize winning novel The Ghost Road. L.R. Reeve* some of whose encounters with famous people we are posting, actually never met him but saw him lecture and, sadly, missed a chance to meet him '…after he had addressed an audience at Cambridge he invited the London contingent to his rooms at St John's College for coffee and discussion. Some of us, I among them, wanted to return by the next train and reluctantly refused. What a chance I missed!' Nevertheless he has a good account of him:

W.H.R.RIVERS

Dr Rivers (1864 - 1922) was one of those rare men who call forth the best generous impulses of anyone with whom they come in contact. No extreme selfish extrovert, no criminal, nobody I should think, could resist his unconscious charm; and he himself, like Harold Nicolson, couldn't hate anybody.

We read a very warm appreciation from Siegfried Sassoon in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. It seems that Sassoon, suffering from the harsh nervous strains of World War I, was admitted to a hospital where, within a few minutes of his entrance, he met Captain Rivers, RAMC. Immediately he took a liking to his physician,

Gaudier-Brzeska Exhibition 1956

This was a mimeographed typescript found in a book on World War 1 art. Many thanks to J. Wood Palmer.

   Self Portrait 1913

INTRODUCTION TO THE GAUDIER-BRZESKA EXHIBITION AT

4 ST. JAMES'S SQUARE, LONDON IN 1956 BY J.WOOD PALMER.

   Gaudier-Brzeska was born Henri Gaudier at St Jean de Brays, Loiret on October 4th 1891. He was killed in action with the French army, after twice being decorated for bravery, at Neuville St Vaast on June 15th 1915. For any man this span of life would be counted brief; for the average artist it must preclude any significant development in this work as well as physically limiting his output. Gaudier-Brzeska was not an average artist; for him the three or four years of his working life as a sculptor were sufficient in which to pass through the phases of promise and arrive at a maturity, producing during this period so astonishing an array of sculptures and drawings that his achievement must be unparalleled in our time.

   Enough has been written already about his early life in France,

The Potato Man and the MP ---a First World War Story

Discovered in the library of descendants of geneticist Dr. Redcliffe Salaman, author of The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1949 ) is the final volume of an Elzevier Press  edition of Lucan’s Pharsalia,  dated 1671.

It’s fitting that the poem treats of the civil war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the Senate headed by Pompey the Great, because it was found among the rubble of Arras, blitzed by the Germans in 1916, by a soldier, Major Daniel Hopkin, MC, who on returning home to England presented it to Salaman’s son Raphael (then aged about 10 ), who just happened to be one of his  private pupils. On further investigation, the friendship between Salaman senior (b 1874) and Hopkin, his junior by 12 years, becomes even more intriguing.

As far as we know, the two men were not comrades in arms in 1916, though they were both soldiers in the Great War. Salaman saw action in Palestine, while, as we already know, Hopkin was at the Western Front. We do know, however, that in February  28th 1918 both officers took part in the march through Whitechapel of the Jewish Legion, which was composed of Jewish soldiers who were fighting in the War. Quite what Hopkin, of staunch Welsh stock, was doing in this march to celebrate Jewish courage and commitment to the Empire, is not quite clear, but the parade turned out to be a great public relations success. One working class East Ender, who witnessed the event
, was overheard to remark that he was pleasantly surprised to see such evidence of Jewish bravery. ‘I was taught that all Jews were shirkers ‘ he said.

Salaman (incidentally, the only man ever to be named after a residential square in London) was interested in the relationship between Christians and Jews, a debate to which Hopkin may also have contributed , which may explain his presence in the Jewish Legion parade.  After the end of hostilities Salaman returned to his home in Barley, Hertfordshire

Angels at Mons

Found - a small thin 4 page pamphlet Angels at Mons printed in Felixstowe, England about 1920. Its price was ninepence for a 100 and it was almost certainly for distribution in churches. Ours was found in a missal.

There is much elsewhere about the angels that are said to have appeared on the WW1 battlefield at Mons. Arthur Machen's 1915 book The Bowmen and Other Legends of War really started the legend.

Historian A.J.P. Taylor was so impressed by the evidence then available that he felt confident referring to Mons, in his 1963 History of the First World War, as the only battle where “supernatural intervention was observed, more or less reliably, on the British side.”

The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural says of Machen's book: "During Machen's lifetime 'The Bowmen' was easily his most influential work of fiction, in ways he never predicted. First published in a 1914 Evening News after the Battle of Mons, it told how British troops, their retreat cut off by the Germans, were miraculously rescued by a ghostly St. George and his bowmen of Agincourt. Widely accepted as true or as a genuine legend, the incident is regularly referred to even today, in books of occult lore and oral histories of the Great War." Fortean Times has this great story of hoaxes and mayhem around the legend with a report on a Hollywood movie that was going to be made on the angels with Marlon Brando.

Angels at Mons

---

Testimonies of men
who saw them.

---

"Your young men shall see visions. ” Joel 2 : 28.
" I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath. " Acts 2 : 19.

  Mrs A. L. Cooke, 62 The Grove, Bedford, in " The Record " of Sept. 9th, writes :–

  " On a Sunday evening quite recently the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Bournemouth was preaching a sermon about Angels. Two officers present followed him into the vestry and told him how much interested they had been with his sermon for said they:–We were at the Battle of Mons and saw the Angels.”

  In another part of Bournemouth lives a maiden lady, who is an aunt to the officer who says that the Vision of Angels at Mons has changed his whole life, that he did not believe the Bible before

A Johnson and Boswell scholar at the front 1918

From the introduction to R.W. Chapman's scholarly edition of Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland... (Oxford 1924.) Chapman survived World War One. While a generation of great  scholars were killed and many books and academic projects were never completed Chapman actually managed to work on editing Boswell while soldiering at the Macedonia front - as he explains.

In the fine tradition of the soldier/scholar he always travelled with his Horace (Odes); just after the war he wrote The Portrait of a Scholar and Other Essays Written in Macedonia 1916-1918 (Oxford University Press, 1920.) He collected silver spoons, and on that subject he regarded 'the speech of Eton and Christ Church as the most beautiful of earthly sounds...' Returning from the Eastern front he stated that there were 'few more exciting pursuits than textual criticism.' He also edited Jane Austen, for which he is now chiefly known.

Mountain gun at Macedonia Front in World War 1

This edition was planned, and in great part executed, in Macedonia, in the summer of 1918. I had a camp behind Smol Hill, on the left bank of the Vardar, and a six inch gun (Mark XI, a naval piece, on an improvised carriage; 'very rare in this state'), with which I made a demonstration in aid of the French and Greek armies, when they stormed the heights beyond the river; I think in June.

J.N.W. Sullivan & Colin Wilson -- 'The Desirability of the Ordinary.'

Found in a pamphlet by Colin Wilson: Autobiographical Reflections (Paupers' Press, 1980) this quotation from the writer J.W.N. Sullivan. Sullivan was a friend of Aldous Huxley & John Middleton Murry, later he knew Aleister Crowley and was part of Ottoline Morrell's intellectual country house salon at Garsington in the 1920s. In the first World War he worked in the ambulance services in Serbia. Colin Wilson writes of him:

I have always felt that the very essence of the human problem was grasped by that fine music critic, J. W. N. Sullivan, in his classic autobiography But For the Grace of God (London: Jonathan Cape 1932). He writes about the first world war:

'The only assimilable 'lesson' taught by the war was the extreme desirability of the ordinary commonplace civilised life. Even as seen from the relative security of a war hospital that life seemed desirable almost beyond imagining. Looking out on those dark, alien Serbian hills, after a day spent amongst the sights and odours of suppurating flesh (for all our wounded, on the long journey from the front, developed gangrene), I have had visions of Paradise. I have pictured the lighted Strand, one of the golden streets of Heaven, and longed for its ambrosia, two poached eggs on toast, in those dazzling halls of light called Lyons' restaurants. It was inconceivable to me that I could ever have been discontented with life in such celestial surroundings.