Esmond Romilly
Esmond Marcus David Romilly (10 June 1918 – 30 November 1941) was a British socialist, anti-fascist and journalist, who was in turn a schoolboy rebel, a veteran with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and, following the outbreak of the Second World War, an observer with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is perhaps best remembered for his teenage elopement with his distant cousin Jessica Mitford, the youngest-but-one of the Mitford sisters.
Born into an aristocratic family – he was a nephew of Clementine Churchill – he emerged in the 1930s as a precocious rebel against his background, openly espousing communist views at the age of fifteen. He ran away from Wellington College, and campaigned vociferously against the British public school system, by publishing a critical left wing magazine, Out of Bounds: Public Schools' Journal Against Fascism, Militarism and Reaction, and (jointly with his brother) a memoir analysing his school experiences. At the age of eighteen he joined the International Brigades and fought on the Madrid front during the Spanish Civil War, of which he wrote and published vivid account.
After returning from Spain, Romilly largely abandoned communism (he had never formally joined the party) in favour of democratic socialism. Unable to settle in London, he and his wife relocated to America in 1939. When the Second World War broke out Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and began training as a pilot, but was discharged on medical grounds. He re-enlisted, and retrained as an observer. Posted back to England, he lost his life when his plane failed to return from a bombing raid in November 1941.
Contents
Life[edit]
Family background[edit]
Esmond Romily's maternal grandfather was Henry Montague Hozier (1838–1907), a professional soldier and City financier who was knighted in 1903. In 1878 he had married Lady Blanche Ogilvy (1852–1925), eldest daughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Four children were produced during the marriage: Katherine, born 1883, Clementine born in 1885, and twins Nellie and William born in 1888. However, the marriage was unhappy and marked by infidelities on both sides, to the extent that the precise parentage of the four children has long been doubted. Hozier appears to accepted that the elder daughters were probably his, but largely ignored the twins who, when the marriage ended in 1891, remained with their mother while Hozier initially took responsibility for the older girls before disappearing from the family scene altogether.[1] The question of the twins' paternity remained unresolved. One suggested candidate was the writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt[2]; another was Blanche's brother-in-law, Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the future Mitford sisters.[3]
Nellie Hozier grew up in the family's various homes in Seaford on the English south coast, in Dieppe in France, and finally in Berkhamstead where she attended the Girls' High School with her elder sister Clementine.[4] In September 1908 she acted as a bridesmaid at Clementine's wedding to Winston Churchill.[5] At the beginning of the First World War in August 1914, Nellie volunteered as a nursing auxiliary in Belgium and was briefly a prisoner of war before repatriation at the end of the year.[6] Back in England, she met an officer in the Scots Guards, Lieutenant-Colonel Bertram Henry Samuel Romilly, who had been seriously wounded while fighting in France.[7] Romilly was from a distinguished landowning family with a long tradition of public service.[8] The couple married in December 1915; their elder son Giles Samuel Bertram Romilly was born on 19 September 1916. The second son, Esmond, followed on 10 June 1918.[2][9][n 1]
Early years[edit]
Esmond was born at No. 15 Pimlico Road, in a busy part of London close to Victoria Station.[9] It was a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle, in which Nellie rather than Colonel Romilly was the principal influence.[2][n 2] Esmond followed his elder brother to school, first at Gibbs's Day School in nearby Sloane Street and then, from 1927, as a boarder at Newlands Preparatory School at Seaford.[12] Holidays were divided between the family's property in Dieppe and the Churchill cousins' home at Chartwell, and the Romilly estates at Huntington Park in the West Country.[13]
Just before his ninth birthday, Esmond began at Newlands in the May 1927. It was a small school, with some forty-odd boys; Giles's later account, in which he disguises the school as "Seacliffe" and alters the names of the main personnel, depicts an easygoing and undemanding establishment run by an elderly and by now largely ineffective headmaster.[12] Matters changed when in 1930 the headmaster and others of the old guard finally retired and were replaced by more vigorous and purposeful successors.[14][15] By his own account, Esmond's academic prowess placed him at the top of the school, although in terms of behaviour he was one of the very worst.[14] Nevertheless, by the time he left Newlands in 1932 he had managed to register a number of personal successes: Head Boy, Patrol Leader of the Otters, captain of cricket and Rugby football, winner of cups for boxing and tennis, and a prize for History.[16]
The choice of Wellington as a public school was evidently the boys' own. Giles has revealed that he and Esmond had been entered for Eton College at an early age, and were expected to go there. However, when the time came Giles pleaded to be allowed to go to Wellington instead: "[It] was associated with soldiers and we were both very military".[17]. Their wishes were granted; Giles began at Wellington in January 1930,[18] and Esmond followed in September 1931.[19]
Wellington[edit]
The choice of Wellington as a public school was evidently the boys' own. Giles has revealed that he and Esmond had been entered for Eton College at an early age, and were expected to go there. However, when the time came Giles pleaded to be allowed to go to Wellington instead: "[It] was associated with soldiers and we were both very military".[17]. Their wishes were granted; Giles began at Wellington in January 1930,[18] and Esmond followed in September 1931.[19]
Reluctant conformist[edit]
Wellington College had been founded by national subscription as a memorial to the first Duke, who had died in 1852. It had opened in 1859, primarily as a military orphanage for the sons of deceased officers, but by the 1920s had evolved into a public school of a highly reactionary character.[20] T. C. Worsley, who taught there in the early 1930s, described it as "philistine to a degree almost unimanaginable in a great school", and "[I]n every possible way ... thirty, forty, fifty years behind the times".[21] Its style was of absolute conformity, based on what Kevin Ingram, Esmond's biographer, calls a "doctrine of suppression"; a tight curriculum that accounted for every moment of the boys' time, and a "dormitory" system that placed boys in small exclusive units that kept them apart from the rest of the school in every activity outside the classroom.[22] Esmond would later write of his "hatred" at seeing "the same faces opposite one every day ... always there was the same monotonous conversation".[23]
In her biographical study, Meredith Whitford describes the adolescent Esmond as "conceited, bumptious, argumentative, spoilt, ambitious for authority, a grubby, unhandy child, extroverted and lazy and too intelligent for his surroundings".[24] However, there is little evidence of rebellion on Esmond's part during his first two years at Wellington. In general, he wrote, his politics were of the Daily Express variety. He describes himself since his Newlands days as a romantic Tory, a Jacobite (supporter of the Stuart claim to the British throne),[25] and after meeting Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1931 was briefly attracted to the latter's New Party - he recalls distributing some New Party literature among his fellow-Wellingtonians.[26] Esmond also records a violent quarrel that arose over his decorating his bed with a tartan rug as an ostentatious display of his Jacobitism,[27] but such incidents were rare; in the main he had, according to Whitworth, succumbed to conformity, "abandon[ing] the romantic calls of the past for the strident demands of the present".[24]. At the end of his first year he was awarded a prize – "Middle School Recitation, Third Block" – which he received on Speech Day from the hands of the Duke of Connaught.[28]
Rebel[edit]
When in the summer of 1932 Giles announced his conversion to Bolshevism, Esmond records his family's shocked reaction (and "Uncle Winston"'s considerable amusement), but at the time he took no specific steps to embrace communism as a personal creed.[29] This followed some nine months later, during the 1933 Easter holidays spent as usual in Dieppe. Before leaving for France, Esmond had acquired a copy of the Daily Worker, and had arranged for further copies to be delivered to Dieppe. Through this clandestine reading, Esmond made contact with groups of communists in London, and arranged to meet them on his return to England.[30] The meetings duly took place, and Esmond was impressed by them, although his ideas were far from clearly formed: "When I went back to Wellington for the summer term, I took with me an odd collection of ideas".[31] Among other things, like others at the time he tended to confuse communism with pacificism. However, he was determined to convert "at least 20 Wellingtonians" to the new creed.[31]
During the following months Esmond engage in varioius acts of somewhat incoherent rebellion. He joined a "peace correspondence" group, until it was clear that his young, female correspondent was more interested in a sexual than a political relationship.[32] His first concrete act agaainst the Wellington establishment came on his 15th birthday, 10 June 1933, when he refused to sign up for the Officers Training Corps, an action which to his disappointment incurred only mild disapproval and which, after consultation with his parents was allowed to stand.[33] He had written a fiery letter to a left-wing student magazine, the Student Vanguard, in which he asserted that "Every boy is compelled to join the Corps at the age of fifteen and must stay there until he leaves", a patently untrue statement for which he was required to provide a written apology.[34][35]
Towards the end of the 1933 summer term, Esmond took advantage of a school holiday to visit the Parton Street bookshop in West London, where he had arranged to meet one of his communist correspondents. The Parton Street premises, part bookshop, part circulating library, partly a centre for radical intellectuals and poets, was run on a philanthropic basis by David Archer, a Cambridge graduate and former Wellingtonian with whom Esmond struck an immediate rapport.[36][37] Among the habitués were the poets John Cornford, Stephen Spender and David Gascoyne, the budding actor Alec Guinness, and the soldier-diplomat and writer T.E Lawrence. The Parton Street Press was Dylan Thomas's first publisher.[38][n 3] Whatever the outcome of the arranged meeting, Esmond had, as Ingram remarks, found a new spiritual home in which to revive his flagging spirits. His mood was further improved at the start of the summer vaction when he attended a communist demonstration at Deptford.[40]
Returning to Wellington for the 1933 autumn term, Esmond became the leader of a small group of followers, none of whom he found particularly inspiring.[41] On 15 October, at the Wellington Debating Society, he proposed the motion that "In the opinion of this house the political freedom of women is a sign of a civilized society". Giles led for the opposition, and the motion was defeated by 29 votes to 9.[42] A month later he was involved in perhaps his most direct act of rebellion against the College ethos, when in advance of the Armistice Day commemorations he distributed a consignment of badges from the Anti-War Movement, to be worn in addition to the venerated poppy. From the same organisation he acquired anti-war leaflets which he and a confederate inserted into the hymn-books from which the hymn O Valiant Hearts would be sung at the Armistice service.[43][n 4] Esmond was again forced to apologise, this time under direct threat of expulsion, and to provide an undertaking that nothing similar would occur in the future.[43][45]
Although often at odds with each other, the Romilly brothers were capable of working together. In January 1934, after Esmond had addressed a meeting of the Federation of Student Societies (a university-based Marxist organisation that co-ordinated left-wing student activities),[46] the brothers decided to launch a new magazine, Out of Bounds ("Against Reaction in Public Schools").[2] A manifesto was prepared and circulated among interested parties: the first issue would be in March 1934, it would appear twice termly (cost one shilling); among the problems the first issue would discuss was "the positive and blatant use of the public schools as a weapon in the cause of reaction".[47] Although these initial steps were carried out without undue publicity, by the end of January the story had broken in the right-wing press, giving rise to headlines such as "Red Menace in Public Schools" and "Officer's Son Sponsors Extremist Journal".[48] The headmaster of Wellington, F.B. Malim, who had first given a provisional consent to the project, now demanded that the brothers abandon their activities.[49] Esmond's solution was simple; rather than give up the project he would run away from the school.[2]
Spain[edit]
In spite of his pacifistic beliefs, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Romilly's hatred of fascism led him to bicycle to Marseille, where, despite his lack of military training, he joined the International Brigades. With a minimum of preparation, he and other British volunteers were thrown into the defence of Madrid as a machine-gun section with the German Thaelmann Battalion. Almost all his companions were killed; he was invalided out with dysentery, and sent back to Britain to recover. While recuperating, he met and fell in love with his second cousin, Jessica Mitford. Mitford was also an anti-fascist, unlike her sister Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and her sister Unity, a friend of Adolf Hitler.
Romilly had an offer from the News Chronicle to return to Spain as their correspondent and they arranged for Jessica to accompany him.[50] Romilly, along with his friend Philip Toynbee, sent back war news. After some legal difficulties, Romilly and Mitford, both 19, married in Bayonne, France, on 18 May 1937. He spent his honeymoon writing Boadilla, an account of his Spanish experiences.[51]
The couple returned to Britain, where Romilly joined the Labour Party and lived in the East End of London, then a poor working-class district. Their first daughter, Julia, was born there in December 1937, but died in May 1938 in a measles epidemic.
America[edit]
The Romillys moved to the United States, where Romilly worked at a variety of odd jobs, including selling silk stockings door to door, and setting up a bar in Miami, but without much financial success. When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Romilly remained in the US, but he moved in 1940 to Canada to volunteer[52] and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His daughter Constancia (better known as 'Dinky' or 'Donk') was born on 9 February 1941. Later that year Romilly was shot down over the North Sea after a bombing raid over Germany. He was 23.
It was rumoured during his life that Romilly was born of an affair between his mother and Winston Churchill.[citation needed] The news that his plane had gone missing in action was broken to his wife by Churchill personally.
Descendants[edit]
His daughter Constancia had two sons from her relationship with the African-American civil-rights activist James Forman; thus Romilly has two grandsons, 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner[53] James Robert Lumumba Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School, and Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman, an actor.
Works[edit]
- Boadilla by Esmond Romilly. Hamish Hamilton, London. 1937 ASIN B00086UVXW
- Boadilla by Esmond Romilly, with an introduction & annotations by George Nichols. The Clapton Press Limited, London. 2018. ISBN 978-1999654306
- Boadilla, A personal account of a battle in Spain by Esmond Romilly with an introduction and notes by Hugh Thomas. Macdonald, London. 1971. ISBN 978-0356035345
- Boadilla by Esmond Romilly (Edition in Spanish with an Introduction by Antonio R. Celada) Amarú Ediciones, Salamanca, Spain. 2011. ISBN 978-84-8196-324-3
- Out of Bounds: the education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly by Giles Romilly & Esmond Romilly. Hamish Hamilton, 1935. Reprinted Umbria Press, 1978. ISBN 978-1910074060
Notes[edit]
- ^ Esmond Romilly bore a physical resemblance to his uncle-by-marriage, Winston Churchill, a fact which gave rise to family rumours that Churchill, rather than Romilly, was Esmond's natural father, but there are no substantial grounds to support this.[10]
- ^ Under the pseudonym "Anna Gerstein", Nellie published an autobiographical novel depicting family life in Pimlico Road.[11]
- ^ Archer eventually introduced Esmond to many of these figures. Dylan Thomas's girlfriend Pamela Hansford Johnson remarked that the 20-year-old poet "looked more like a runaway schoolboy than Esmond Romilly, who really was one".[39]
- ^ Ingram wrongly attributes the hymn to Rudyard Kipling. It was written by Sir John Arkwright MP and set to music by Dr Charles Harris.[44]
Citations[edit]
- ^ Whitford 2014, p. 27.
- ^ a b c d e Parker, Peter (25 September 2014). "Romilly, Esmond Marcus David". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition. Retrieved 13 November 2018.
- ^ Lovell 2002, pp. 25–26.
- ^ Whitford 2014, pp. 28–30.
- ^ Whitford 2014, p. 30.
- ^ Whitford 2014, pp. 30–32.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 4.
- ^ Whitford 2014, pp. 34–39.
- ^ a b Ingram 1985, p. 8.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 17–18.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 3, 6–7.
- ^ a b Ingram 1985, p. 20.
- ^ Whitford 2014, p. 45.
- ^ a b Whitford 2014, p. 44.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 25.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 29.
- ^ a b Romilly and Romilly, 2015, p. 27.
- ^ a b Ingram 1985, p. 24.
- ^ a b Ingram 1985, p. 30.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 34.
- ^ Worsley 1985, p. 63.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 32–33.
- ^ Romilly and Romilly, 2015, p. 114.
- ^ a b Whitford 2015, p. 57.
- ^ Romilly and Romilly, 2015, p. 108.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 41.
- ^ Romilly and Romilly, 2015, p. 110.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 39.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 42.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 44–45.
- ^ a b Romilly and Romilly, 2015, p. 113.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 46.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 46–47.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 47–48.
- ^ Whitford 2015, p. 60.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 50–52.
- ^ Fraser 2012, p. 70.
- ^ Whitford 2015, p. 61.
- ^ Fraser 2012, p. 71.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 52.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 54.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 55.
- ^ a b Ingram 1985, pp. 57–58.
- ^ "Hereford and Worcester: World War I". BBC. 13 November 2014. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
- ^ Whitford 2015, p. 63.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 61.
- ^ Ingram 1985, p. 64.
- ^ Whitford 2015, p. 64.
- ^ Ingram 1985, pp. 65–66.
- ^ Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels, chapter fifteen.
- ^ Boadilla by Esmond Romilly, The Clapton Press, London, 2018 ISBN 978-1999654306
- ^ The Canadian Government lists Pilot Officer Esmond Mark David Romilly's service number as J5677, date of birth 10 July 1918, and date of death 30 November 1941.
- ^ "Four Yalies win Pulitzer Prize; finalists include professor, alumni". YaleNews. 2018-04-16. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
Sources[edit]
- Fraser, Robert (2012). Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-955814-8.
- Ingram, Kevin (1985). Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-78707-1.
- Lovell, Mary (2002). The Mitford Girls. London: Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349115-05-4.
- Mitford, Jessica. Hons and Rebels. Victor Gollancz, 1960.
- Romilly, Giles; Romilly, Esmond (2015). Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly. London: Umbria Press. ISBN 978-1-910074-06-0.
- Seldon, Anthony; Walsh, David (2013). Public Schools and The Great War. London: Pen and Sword. p. 216. ISBN 978-1-78159-308-0.
- Toynbee, Philip. Friends Apart: A Memoir of Esmond Romilly and Jasper Ridley in the Thirties. Macgibbon & Kee, 1954.
- Whitford, Meredith (2014). Churchill's Rebels: Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly. London: Umbria Press. ISBN 978-1-910074-01-5.
- Worsley, T.C. (1985). Flannelled Fool: A Slice of Life in the Thirties. London: The Hogarth Press. ISBN 0-7012-0590-3.
