Ethel Mannin: Confessions and Impressions (1930)

A third of this book is autobiography. The daughter of a 'country girl' from a farm and a Cockney father, a postal worker of Irish ancestry, Ethel Mannin (1900 – 1984) was born near Lavender Hill in Clapham. Her first chapter contains such gems as 'The defiant snobbery of the plebian is as stupid as the arrogant snobbery of the patrician', and 'the affectation of the Lowbrow [is] as tiresome as the affectation of the Highbrow', calls herself a 'Philistine' and says that she started work as a shorthand typist at fifteen, and 'that is all there is to it'.

Political awareness came to Mannin at a young age, and her earliest memory is walking on Clapham Common with her father, who stopped to talk with a man for whom he had a great respect – the socialist MP John Burns: she thought socialism the right stance to take until she was eighteen.

Mannin spent a year in a private school where she thought the 'spinster' schoolteachers drew a sadistic sexual pleasure from disallowing their pupils to leave the room to go to the toilet, then sending them home for wetting the floor. She sees no hope either in state education, believing the teachings of A. S. Neill and Bertrand Russell (a future lover of hers) to be the path to a future without schools or marriage.

She worked for Charles Highham at fifteen, by the following year was writing adverts and running internal business magazines, and at seventeen was writing stories, poems and articles for one of Higham's monthlies that she produecd herself. By this time, she had had a strong, year-long, non-sexual friendship with an anarchist in his late twenties who gave her a more intellectual education than any organized schooling had done for her.

After a few inconsequential affairs she married and lived at Strawberry Hill for five years, during which she had a child and wrote four novels. But after spending a short time in the States Mannin realized that marriage wasn't for her. She bought the cottage of her dreams near Wimbledon Common and began to understand a few things: people are dead, civilization has distorted natural intelligence, they fill their lives with meaningless rubbish, they have sterilized their emotions by intellectualizing them: D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley are strong influences.

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The remaining two thirds of the book are devoted to prominent people of the period that Mannin has met. Most of her portraits are complimentary, although she is particularly scathing about the drama critic Hannan Swaffer, whom she detests for a number of reasons, and calls him a puritan: a great insult in Mannin's world.

Understandably, her best words are reserved for the fellow anarchists A. S. Neill and Bertrand Russell, (whom she says has a 'first-class mind').

She dedicates the book to another 'first-class mind', an unnamed man she loved greatly but who killed himself shortly before publication.

Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, and Rupert Brooke

Yes, of course I'm well aware that Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is undoubtedly the most well known of the World War I poets and one of the most patriotic, so what exactly is this post doing here? That he was strikingly handsome, that he died very young while enlisted, and that he had drawn a number of famous people into his circle is indisputable, but still, what is he doing on this blog? Grantchester is certainly very well noted for its former resident, and indeed appears to exploit his residence quite strongly - as indeed it should - but all the same, why should I, a pacifist with strong views against the tourist norm, choose to apparently trumpet the Rupert Brooke cause?

I'm not sure about this, but even if you've never heard of Rupert Brooke, Grantchester is well worth a visit.

Rupert Brooke went to Kings College, Cambridge, shown above.

In 1909 Brooke, who had graduated from the university, moved into lodgings at Orchard House, Grantchester, a village three miles from Cambridge. Since 1897, Orchard House had been run by Brooke's landlords, the Stevenson family, who catered in particular to university students by serving tea in their orchard grounds, and a number of Brooke's friends, such as Gwen Darwin, Jacques Riverat, Noel Olivier and Frances Cornford, used the tea rooms. In distinction to the Cambridge Apostles, Maynard Keynes called them the 'Neo-Pagans'. According to Graham Chainey's A Literary History of Cambridge, intellectual salvation lay in 'night bathing, socialism, mystical delight in homely objects and the pursuit of eternal youth'.

Brooke's father died in January 1910, Brooke became caretaker housekeeper at Cambridge, and by the following year he was living at Old Vicarage in Grantchester. He had decided that his dissertation would be on John Webster, the Elizabethan playwright.

The orchard tea pavilion - which still stands today, with its corrugated tin roof and wooden structure - has attracted such people as Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, E. M. Forster and Augustus John.

There is now an interesting Rupert Brooke Museum close to the Orchard.

But for many, especially during the summer months, the long queue for tea more than validates the visit.

The Orchard continues to serve tea, and also sells small pots of honey, an item Brooke is particularly associated with from his famous poem 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', the famous final lines of which read:

'Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?'

One of the village pubs, the Rupert Brooke, shows the time several times.

And, if at all possible, the urge to photograph the parish church clock at exactly this time is irresistible:

Brooke wrote 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', in the Café des Westens in Berlin in May 1912. He lived in the Old Vicarage after a brief spell in which he was forced to return to Cambridge in 1912, and the Old Vicarage itself, now owned by the, er, novelist and former MP Jeffrey Archer and his 'fragrant' wife Mary, has a bronze statue of Brooke at its entrance:

The village is also noted for Grantchester Meadows, which has been mentioned in poetry and song. In Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes remembers Sylvia Plath sitting on a stile reading Chaucer aloud to the cows:

'Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.

It must have sounded lost. But the cows
Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.'

And it seems obligatory, when on this subject, to mention Pink Floyd's 'Grantchester Meadows' from their album Ummagumma, written by Roger Waters: even the Rupert Brooke Museum has a framed copy of the words.

Grantchester will obviously, and quite rightly, continue to exploit its literary associations, and Brooke paid homage to the poet Lord Byron, also a former resident of Cambridge, and whose existence is now remembered in the nearby Byrons Pool.

Not all remains of the original Grantchester, and the Green Man pub is a casualty. This sign is perhaps a humorous reminder of past times, and certainly the content is politically incorrect:

‘Rupert Brooke’, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

I

Your face was lifted to the golden sky
Ablaze beyond the black roofs of the square
As flame on flame leapt, flourishing in air
Its tumult of red stars exultantly
To the cold constellations dim and high:
And as we neared the roaring ruddy flare
Kindled to gold your throat and brow and hair
Until you burned, a flame of ecstasy.
The golden head goes down into the night
Quenched in cold gloom — and yet again you stand
Beside me now with lifted face alight,
As, flame to flame, and fire to fire you burn…
Then, recollecting, laughingly you turn,
And look into my eyes and take my hand.

II

Once in my garret — you being far away
Tramping the hills and breathing upland air,
Or so I fancied — brooding in my chair,
I watched the London sunshine feeble and grey
Dapple my desk, too tired to labour more,
When, looking up, I saw you standing there
Although I'd caught no footstep on the stair,
Like sudden April at my open door.

Though now beyond earth's farthest hills you fare,
Song-crowned, immortal, sometimes it seems to me
That, if I listen very quietly,
Perhaps I'll hear a light foot on the stair
And see you, standing with your angel air,
Fresh from the uplands of eternity.

III

Your eyes rejoiced in colour's ecstasy,
Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,
When, over a great sunlit field afire
With windy poppies streaming like a sea
Of scarlet flame that flaunted riotously
Among green orchards of that western shire,
You gazed as though your heart could never tire
Of life's red flood in summer revelry.

And as I watched you, little thought had I
How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky
Your soul should wander down the darkling way,
With eyes that peer a little wistfully,
Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see
Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.

IV

October chestnuts showered their perishing gold
Over us as beside the stream we lay
In the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,
Talking of verse and all the manifold
Delights a little net of words may hold,
While in the sunlight water-voles at play
Dived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,
And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.

Your soul goes down unto a darker stream
Alone, O friend, yet even in death's deep night
Your eyes may grow accustomed to the dark
And Styx for you may have the ripple and gleam
Of your familiar river, and Charon's bark
Tarry by that old garden of your delight.

Lionel Britton's Letter to Bertrand Russell, 28 November 1955

As I mentioned in a post below, Lionel Britton and Bertrand Russell wrote a number of letters to each other. One dates from about eighteen months after Britton was injured in a car accident in which he sustained multiple fractures and was lucky to escape with his life. He briefly explains his difficulties resulting from the accident, and says that he is now recovering. He also says that he received an undisclosed sum of money in compensation, and hopes that he can 'use [it] to publish my work, & be independent of publishers' readers' (1). Unfortunately, nothing came of this, and for some unknown reason Britton later lost his money.

The letter is also interesting in that it reveals that Britton had recently attended a 'One World meeting' in which he was pleased to see Russell 'standing up to the rowdies'. The last volume of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell has cast light on this comment (2).

Andrew Bone, the editor of the volume, reveals in an Appendix that the occasion took place in at Central Hall, Westminster, on 9 November 1955. The speakers – Russell, Professor Alexander Haddow, Lord Beveridge, and Henry Usborne – had contributed to Gilbert McAllister's The Bomb: Challenge and Answer, and the meeting was sponspored by the British branch of the World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government (3). There was a great deal of heckling because some feared that world government would mean domination by communists, and because of interruptions Russell, according to The Times, was unable to speak for ten minutes.

(1) Lionel Britton, letter to Bertrand Russell, 28 November 1955, in the possession of Harry Berberian.

(2) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, ed. by Kenneth Blackwell [et al.], 29 vols (London: Allen & Unwin, and Routledge, 1983– ), XXVIV: Détente or Destruction 1955–1957 (ed. by Andrew Bone, 2005), 409–10.

(3) The Bomb: Challenge and Answer, ed. by Gilbert McAllister (London: Batsford, 1955).

Bertrand Russell on Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love, and the Correspondence between the Two Men

Bertrand Russell was very impressed with Lionel Britton's novel Hunger and Love, to such an extent that – very unusually – he wrote a five-page Introduction to it, full of praise. Of course, Britton took as much advantage of this Introduction as he could, as he had done with Bernard Shaw's (rather ambivalent) comment on his earlier apocalyptic science fiction play Brain.

In his Introduction, Russell says:

'Mr. Britton's "Hunger and Love" is a very remarkable piece of work. His hero, Arthur Phelps, who is first a boy and then a young man, possesses a first-rate mind, but nothing else. Every conceivable obstacle is put in the way of his acquiring knowledge; as a bookseller's assistant, he is tempted to read the books in his employer's stock, but when caught doing so, is dismissed with ignominy. He has that difficulty about acquiescing in preventable evil that characterises the best minds, and therefore does not achieve quick success, as a person of a slightly lower order of ability would do. The book relates not only his personal adventures, but the growth of his philosophy and his social outlook. It is filled with a splendid rage against the humbug, the cruelty, and the moral degradation of the possessing classes' (1).

The two final sentences of Russell's Introduction read:

'Mr. Britton has portrayed his world with passion, with vividness, with a wealth of illustrative detail, and with a considerable power of generalising thought. For these reasons, I am convinced that his book deserves to be widely read.'

Russell apparently only wrote an Introduction to one other novel (the title of which is at present unknown to me), but his very positive verdict on Hunger and Love is a very strong testimony to both Britton's ability as a writer and to his persuasive powers as an individual.

Britton and Russell corresponded intermittently from 1930 to 1970. The early letters concern securing a publisher for Britton's books, although the majority of the letters concern Britton's problems with the Society of Authors preventing him from simultaneously publishing Shaw's final play Why She Would Not and Britton's amplification of this (possibly unfinished) work.

A few of the Russell–Britton letters are held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and a number of them are in the private possession of Harry Berberian.

I have only just discovered about Louise Morgan's interview with Russell, which was originally published in Everyman a few months before the publication of Britton's novel (2). In this article, Britton receives a very brief – although nonetheless significant – mention. McMaster University re-publishes the aticle online under its original, eye-catching title:
'Bertrand Russell Would Imprison All Writers of First Books'

In this article Russell playfully states, 'If a law were passed giving six months in jail to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would think it worth their while to do it.' But this wouldn't have deterred Britton, who, in a reply to Russell's comment in Everyman, equally playfully imagined being imprisoned for the publication of Hunger and Love: ‘I don’t think six months in gaol would stop me. Most of my friends say I shall get twenty years. The unkind ones say I shall deserve it’ (3). (Russell had been imprisoned for inciting pacifism, and Britton for conscientious objection, during World War I.)

The article is fascinating in its own right to anyone interested in the way Bertrand Russell wrote.

(1) Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love (London: Putnam, 1931), p. vii.

(2) Louise Morgan, 'Bertrand Russell Would Imprison All Writers of First Books', Everyman, 2 November 1930.

(3) Lionel Britton, letter, ‘Should Authors Be Paid?’, Everyman, 4 December 1930, [n. p.], [n. pg.], Lionel Britton Collection, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL.

So What Did Lionel Britton Write About?

There are a number of posts about Lionel Britton here – although this blog is by no means exclusively about him and his family: its chief interest is in obscurity – but there's almost nothing on what Britton wrote about. In the near future I shall be posting some of my favourite quotations, but in the meantime I give a brief idea below of what to expect from a Britton book.

Bertrand Russell certainly wrote one or two Introductions to books in his time, but I'm sure Hunger and Love was the only working-class novel which he praised so highly. Russell begins this five-page Introduction to the novel with:

'Mr. Britton's 'Hunger and Love' is a very remarkable piece of work. His hero, Arthur Phelps, who is first a boy and then a young man, possesses a first-rate mind, but nothing else. Every conceivable obstacle is put in the way of his acquiring knowledge; as a bookseller's assistant, he is tempted to read the books in his employer's stock, but when caught doing so, is dismissed with ignominy. He has that difficulty about acquiescing in preventable evil that characterises the best minds, and therefore does not achieve quick success, as a person of a slightly lower order of ability would do. The book relates not only his personal adventures, but the growth of his philosophy and his social outlook. It is filled with a splendid rage against the humbug, the cruelty, and the moral degradation of the possessing classes.'

The final sentence of Russell's Introduction reads: 'Mr. Britton has portrayed his world with passion, with vividness, with a wealth of illustrative detail, and with a considerable power of generalising thought. For these reasons, I am convinced that his book deserves to be widely read.' There could have been far worse recommendations for a first novel.

Britton's two science fiction plays, Brain (1930) and Spacetime Inn (1932), also had their supporters.

Bernard Shaw, among others, commended Britton's first play Brain, which is mainly set in the far future. An artificial brain has been constructed in the Sahara Desert, and it rapidly increases in size as it absorbs all the knowledge on earth. Brain’s main goal is to sever the link with the human in order to dictate things for the good of all humankind without the intervention of human faults. In the end the world is destroyed because human conflict could not be eradicated.

Britton's second play, Spacetime Inn, is also worthy of note. Here, two working-class lottery winners – brutalised by ignorance and a complacent middle class – are stranded in a pub with the Queen of Sheba, Bernard Shaw, Queen Victoria, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Karl Marx, and Eve without Adam. The warmongers want them to join in their war games, and the intellectuals want to play mind games with them. After a misunderstanding, the two working-class characters blow everyone up: Britton's central thesis was that a better world can only be achieved with co-operation rather than competition. J. S. Clarke, MP for Maryhill, Glasgow, had the play put on before his fellow MPs in a committee room in the House of Commons 'on the ground that discussion of the play was important for M.P.'s in their conduct of the nation's business'.

Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography

(The information below was a small part of my thesis, but new details of Lionel Britton's life continue to be revealed to me, correcting, enhancing, and in other ways transforming my knowledge of the man.)

Scarcely any biographical information about Lionel Britton is readily available, and since the mid-1930s his name has been almost forgotten. Information about Britton’s family background, though, is helpful to gain an impression of the formation of his ideas, particularly the importance of literature and foreign languages to him, and the reasons for his hatred of capitalism, religion, the law and institutions in general. The details of Britton’s life after the publication of his last imaginative work in 1935 are also an indication of why he disappeared from the public eye.

Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton had far from humble beginnings. At his birth on 4 November 1887 his paternal grandfather, John James Britton, was a solicitor practising in the small Warwickshire market town of Alcester and his father, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, had very recently passed his intermediate examinations to be a solicitor and was now practising in the family business — Britton & Son — in the nearby village of Astwood Bank, where he lived with his family. Lionel’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Thomas, was for some time the representative in France of Samuel Thomas & Sons, manufacturers of needles and fish-hooks in Redditch; this business was founded by Samuel’s father — also named Samuel — who lived in a large house in front of his extensive British Needle Mills until his death in 1878. It was one of the largest businesses in the town, with one hundred and twenty-two employees at the time of the 1871 census. By the 1881 census, Henry Thomas, a younger son of Samuel Thomas senior, appears to have taken over the greater part, if not all, of the family business. By this time Samuel Thomas junior had returned to England on a permanent basis, and he too was a needle manufacturer, employing just twelve people.

Lionel’s mother, Irza Vivian Geraldine, was born in 1866 and had met Richard at Kings Coughton, in a former farmhouse near Alcester where Richard lived with his father and the rest of the family; Irza was a fifteen-year-old poetry enthusiast who had initially gone to the house to visit John James Britton, a ‘real live poet’ who had earned a minor reputation locally, and who later published a novel. Irza and Richard married in 1885 and moved to Astwood Bank, where Ivy was born the following year and Lionel the year after. There are very few listings of Britton & Son at Astwood Bank in Kelly’s Directories for that period: early in 1888, the company went into bankruptcy.

Never fully qualified as a solicitor, Richard — who had previously worked as a teaching assistant and was given to writing philosophical musings by no means entirely different from those of his mature son Lionel — probably did not enjoy the legal profession. On his bankruptcy, he initially tried to find work again as a teaching assistant in England, although the family very soon moved to Paris, where Richard had found work as a managing clerk in a legal firm, and where Lionel’s brother Percy was born. France and the French language run throughout the Britton and the Thomas families: Samuel Thomas junior had spent a number of years in France, where at least six of his children, including Lionel’s mother, were born; Samuel’s wife Marie Antoinette was French, and both of Lionel’s parents spoke the language fluently. This strong French connection must to some extent explain Lionel’s fluency in the language, and is no doubt also indicative of the facility with which he later learned so many others: his friend Herbert Marshall claimed that Britton was fluent in over twenty different languages.

However, Richard’s employment in France lasted only a short time, and the Brittons then moved to the Bournemouth area, where Richard again worked unsuccessfully as a solicitor, and where the family income was supplemented by Irza working as a boarding house keeper. A fourth child, Cyril, was born in 1891, and by the end of the following year the couple had significant debts. In 1894, when Lionel was seven, Richard died of tuberculosis. Irza, who already had at least one suitor, remained in the area and married a gunner in the Royal Navy in 1897, although no other details of this marriage appear to have survived, and she was later to change her name back to Britton.

Lionel, Ivy, Percy and Cyril all moved to Redditch to live with their maternal grandparents, where their grandfather was then a traveller in a fishing tackle business. According to Lionel’s own account, he excelled at school and soon learned all that they could teach him. It seems evident that he showed some of the rebelliousness that would later be a notable feature of his character: he already hated religious instruction, and was excused music lessons because he thought them ‘silly’. By 1901 Ivy was still at school at the age of nearly fifteen, but her younger brother Lionel was almost certainly in London by this time. His grandparents had presumably not wanted, or perhaps had not had the means for, him to continue his education. For a brief period he lodged elsewhere in Redditch, later informing the Daily News and Westminster Gazette that his first job was ‘sandpapering fishing rods’. After running away and spending a few days as an office boy in Birmingham, Britton moved to London, and from this point his work life and intellectual life become very similar to that of Arthur Phelps in Hunger and Love.

In London, Britton found work as an errand boy at a grocer’s in Theobald’s Road, although he was dismissed from there for reasons unknown. He next found more errand work with an educational bookseller, the University Book Co. on Southampton Row, which according to Britton was the main catalyst to his intellectual curiosity, where he secretly read all he could in the firm’s time, which was also when he discovered ‘the penny-dump on the book-barrows on Farringdon Road’, ‘a mine of mind for empty pockets’. Britton worked at the shop for about six years, when he voluntarily left to work as a shop assistant for bookseller A. H. Mayhew (on whom Sarner in Hunger and Love is probably based) in Charing Cross Road for nearly two years; Mayhew found him ‘honest and industrious’ and ‘parted with him with regret’.

Britton appears not to have mentioned World War I in newspaper or magazine articles or surviving letters, although the vicious propaganda machine in the novel, where the narrator tells of Phelps being urged by almost everyone around him into joining the war, seems to be comment enough on Britton’s experience of it: in an obituary, Raymond Douglas reveals that Britton was attacked by a patriotic mob for not enlisting, and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector for about eighteen months.

As early as 1917, Britton started to learn Russian and applied for Russian citizenship, although his application was disallowed by the Soviet ambassador. Then in the early 1920s he found a more remunerative post with the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, where he worked for about six years, latterly as Assistant General Secretary. In his letter of reference in 1929, the General Secretary describes Britton as ‘an independent thinker, cautious and meditative, yet courageous in the expression of his opinions’, and who was also ‘a gifted linguist [whose] translation of the lesser European languages has frequently been of value to us’.

For several years before this Britton had been working on his huge novel Hunger and Love, although he had disagreed with publishers because he refused to allow any cuts to be made to the content. It is a measure of his self-confidence and his powers of persuasion that he secured Bertrand Russell’s five-page Introduction to the novel, and that Constant Huntington of Putnam not only did not insist that he make cuts, but also allowed him to write the final amendments to it more or less as he wished.


The influence of the cinema on Britton’s writing is briefly mentioned in a chapter below, as film was of great interest to him: he was chairman of the experimental London Film Guild in the late 1920s, which had its studio in the same building as Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This voluntary organization was largely unsuccessful, only producing a small number of mainly critically unsuccessful shorts; Britton never directed a film, although he was responsible for some montage work. The secretary of the Guild was Herbert Marshall, who later moved to Russia for a number of years as a student of Eisenstein’s.


By the time Britton left his advertising job in favour of writing, his mother Irza was living with him in a flat in Marylebone, in Saville Street, which was later incorporated into Hanson Street. And by the late 1920s Britton had also met Sinead Acheson, a woman in the legal profession who was to be his devoted friend for the rest of his life, and with whom he appears to have lived intermittently during the 1930s and 1940s.


Britton also had a strong interest in the theatre over many years and frequently attended performances; when he was a teenager, he had been a supernumerary at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Sir Herbert Tree, and wrote his first play — ‘Fang; or, the Reluctant Employee’ — during this period. Before Hunger and Love was finally published, Britton had also written at least a first draft of his three published plays, and it is an indication of his strong powers of persuasion that the play would possibly not have been published without the assistance of Bernard Shaw, into whose hands he contrived to thrust a copy; Shaw passed it on to Sir Barry Jackson, which the press reported with great enthusiasm. Brain was published in May 1930, very shortly after its first and only performance, which was by the Masses Stage and Film Guild at the Savoy Theatre. Brain ensured that Britton was already relatively well known when Hunger and Love was published the following February, and after this his short-lived fame began in earnest and he was in great demand for a few brief years. He was asked to give a number of talks, to open theatres, he became the drama critic for The New Clarion, and established Left Theatre with André van Gyseghem (the first director of Nottingham Playhouse) and several others. There were many articles about him in newspapers and magazines, and a great deal of attention was also given to his second play, Spacetime Inn, for example: the blurb on the dust jacket speaks of ‘the play which was read at the House of Commons — the only occasion in the history of any Parliament that such a thing has ever happened’. Britton’s M. P. friend John Smith Clarke had made the occasion possible, but both the blurb and the headlines are slightly misleading: although Britton himself certainly read his play before a group of M. P.s, the session was only held in a House of Commons committee room. Critically, the play was better received than Brain, although it was performed for four nights only at the Arts Theatre in London, and once by the Hostel Players in Hoddesdon the following year. (For this second performance, the play also attracted a great deal of publicity — much of it pictorial — because Bernard Shaw gave one of his old Norfolk jackets to his namesake in the play.)


There were many caricatures of Britton in the newspapers and magazines of the day because he was quite an unusual figure for the time. Shaw had called him a ‘wild young man’ and Arnold Bennett had thought that he looked as though he had just come from the French Riviera: he had a shock of wiry hair which stood up almost perpendicular to his head and which he rather amateurishly cut himself, and he always wore an open-neck shirt, usually with light trousers or shorts and plimsolls; he was teetotal and did not smoke.


Britton had been anticipating a visit to Russia for some years, and as the initial excitement of his success eased off considerably, he went there in July 1935 at the expense of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Five years previously, the working-class writer Harold Heslop had stayed there for the same amount of time as Britton: three months. The two writers’ impressions of the country have many similarities — Heslop was shocked by the poverty he saw, by his guide’s ignorance of Russian culture, and bewildered by the consternation which his desire to see Zamyatin caused; after attending a show trial, he called himself ‘a stranger in a world beyond my own belief’. Britton’s frequent letters to Acheson express his disgust with the country. He was also alarmed by the poverty, exasperated by the queues and what he saw as the ignorance of the Russian people, as well as the fact that they would not answer his probing questions or allow him to explore his surroundings unescorted; above all, perhaps, he thought that his belief in co-operation as opposed to competition was not being practised in Russia: he believed that food and other shortages were caused by the government channelling money into the defence budget. What he saw forced him to see the United Kingdom as more socialist than Russia; he still thought that Russian communism would eventually succeed in its goals, but thought that the gradualism of the British Labour Party was better suited to the country’s progress than the Communist Party of Great Britain. He returned by boat in October; Irza had become used to having more space, and most of Britton’s belongings had been moved to Acheson’s house.


Britton had awoken from his utopian dream to find a nightmare both in Russia and, more personally, at home. Putnam, having made only a modest profit from Hunger and Love, (less than £100 after 10,000 sales and an expensive promotion campaign) and losses with Brain and Spacetime Inn, had already refused to give more than a perfunctory promotion to Animal Ideas. Britton had delayed his visit to Russia because the play was due to be published in the United Kingdom, but it proved to be a disaster: it was never performed (except by Britton himself at various readings), sales were very low, and it was largely ignored critically. In a revealing fourteen-page letter to Herbert Marshall, he called his experience ‘the snuff-out’: he was facing ruin as a writer and had little money left.

Britton escaped from London to take part in a socialist project at ‘Netherwood’ in Hastings, which was perhaps chosen because of its connection with the working-class writer Robert Tressell. In the second half of the 1930s, Netherwood was a large run-down property which had been bought by the actor and playwright E. C. Vernon Symonds to convert into a left-wing guest house that was intended as a haven for socialist meetings and trade union conferences among other things. Britton received free board and lodging there in return for manual work — mainly gardening and reconstructing the swimming pool — and was eking out the remainder of his advance for the Russian edition of Hunger and Love, although he hated almost everything about Netherwood.

During his stay in Hastings Britton was writing the play ‘Du Barry’, although it was never published and never performed. He later wrote several more plays and a novel, philosophical works, and dramatized several novels, such as The Pickwick Papers, Barchester Towers, Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These and three works by J. Jefferson Farjeon. But apart from a performance of ‘Mr Pickwick’ at Rugby and two translations of rather obscure Russian writers in the 1940s, Britton’s career in the theatre and in print was at an end.


Consequently, although he remained a committed writer, Britton was by economic necessity forced to find other means of survival, which led to an itinerant lifestyle. He taught from time to time, gave play readings throughout the country, and synchronized English dialogue to Russian films. And there was also another source of income: Acheson had bought a second-hand boat — known as ‘Spacetime Inn’, or simply ‘Spacetime’ — which she kept on the Thames and followed Irza’s suggestion to rent it out, with Britton collecting the proceeds from customers. He lived on the boat, in boathouses, or simply by the riverside, from about 1937 to 1944, although not continuously. And towards the end of the 1940s he was living with his mother again, now at Park House, a leasehold property at 66 Tufnell Park Road. In a draft application for a grant from the Civil List fund in 1951, he gave his income as ‘Between £70 and £80 per annum’.


In 1954 Britton suffered multiple injuries in a car accident from which he was very fortunate to survive; however, he received an undisclosed sum in compensation, with which he hoped to publish his work and ‘be independent of publishers’ readers’. Britton was developing an obsession: he had amplified Bernard Shaw’s (possibly unfinished) play Why She Would Not, and for the rest of his life was concerned with the Society of Authors’s refusal to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s fragment and Britton’s ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the society along with its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members. And he was directly or indirectly supported by several prominent writers in opposition to the society’s exclusivity, including Bertrand Russell, who remarked of the society’s attitude to Britton’s writing: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship.’ These were encouraging words, although they can only have fed the obsession: in 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved.


Also in 1964, Britton formed a company — The Park Group Limited — with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’. However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction. Three years later Britton established his own company — Promethean Publishers Ltd — which appears never to have published anything either.

Britton spent his last years as a virtual recluse in Margate. In 1969 he wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell from his new home, in which he states that he has had a nervous breakdown, and has lost his house in Tufnell Park along with all of his money; the reasons for this are not mentioned. But Britton was still trying to sue the Society of Authors as late as June 1970, six months before his death at the local hospital following a heart attack. There were few obituaries, and even those commented on his obscurity.


Herbert Marshall, who was by that time Professor and Director of Soviet and East European Studies (Performing Arts) at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, had all of Britton’s literary effects transported to the university, where they remain today.