Arthur Bryant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the restaurant, see Arthur Bryant's.
Sir Arthur Bryant, CH, CBE (18 February 1899 - 22 January 1985), was a widely popular British historian, and columnist for the Illustrated London News. His reputation since his death has suffered as allegations about a number of controversial episodes in his life have been made public and speculated upon.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Arthur Bryant was the son of Sir Francis Morgan Bryant, a court official in the household of the then Prince of Wales. He was born in Dersingham, Norfolk, near Sandringham and went to Harrow School, followed by Queen's College, Oxford University.
[edit] Early work on Pepys
His early reputation was made by books on Samuel Pepys; it has been suggested that he gave insufficient credit in them to the scholarly work of another, Joseph Robson Tanner (1860-1931), upon which Andrew Roberts claims they were largely based (see his account given in Eminent Churchillians).
J. H. Plumb gives this account (The Making of an Historian I p. 275), of how G. M. Trevelyan passed Tanner's notes to Bryant:
- ... he found Bryant's book [on Charles II] convincing and, equally exciting for Trevelyan, beautifully written. [...] Trevelyan thought Arthur Bryant ideal for the job (he quickly accepted the task) and the notes were handed over. The notes reached 1689 and so did Bryant's biography; the last decade of Pepys's life went unrecorded.
[edit] 1930s
In the late 1930s he was noted for his work in the organisation of historical pageants. During the decade, he was an educational adviser to the Conservative College of Citizenship (properly, the Bonar Law Conservative College)at Ashridge. He was also involved in an effort, not highly successful, to found a National Book Association, as a right-wing counter to the Left Book Club. Subsequently several of his books were published by the newly-established Right Book Club.
[edit] German contacts and the war years
It is also alleged that he had close contacts with Nazi Germany, in 1939. According to the Spartacus web page on him,
- Bryant developed extreme right-wing views and in April 1939 he travelled to Nazi Germany with Major-General John Fuller and Lord Brocket to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Adolf Hitler.
It is further said, for example by Andrew Roberts, that even after the outbreak of World War II his German contacts continued. It is claimed that although these were discovered by the British government, Bryant was not prosecuted. Roberts claims that his production of several patriotic books at this time was effectively a smokescreen.
Unfinished Victory (1940) was a work dealing in part with the origins of the War. Bryant followed it with books in a highly patriotic vein.
[edit] Later years
He later edited the Alanbrooke diaries, in a way that has been considered to be slanted against Winston Churchill. A complete edition is now available, for comparison.
He remained a successful writer all his life (see publications below). Sir Arthur Bryant was the Guest-of-Honour at the Conservative Monday Club's 1966 Annual Dinner, his speech being on the subject of "The Preservation of our National Character". The dinner, at the Savoy Hotel, was sold out.
He was knighted, and made a Companion of Honour. J. H. Plumb (The Making of an Historian I p. 276) wrote that "both of his public honours, his Knighthood and his C.H., were given to him by Harold Wilson, whose favourite historian he had long been."
[edit] Last book
Of his 1980 book, The Elizabethan Experience, the historian C. V. Wedgwood said: "there is not a dull moment in this splendid book. Once again Sir Arthur, a Scheherazade among historians, has broken off the story when we long to hear more."
Also, Earl Attlee, K.G., O.M., said: "...as in all your historical works, you throw a bright light on the past. As a lover of history and of England I can enjoy your writing more than that of any living historian. You carry on a great tradition."
Lastly, the New York Times stated: "...a master craftsman. The sureness with which he moves through his material, the skill with which he chooses the detail, his ability to marshal the facts into a suspenseful narrative, all proclaim the top-drawer historian", (citations from the dust-jacket).
[edit] Reputation and studies
J. H. Plumb, one of Bryant's detractors, wrote (The Making of an Historian I p. 276):
- What Bryant longed for, his one abiding disappointment of life, was professional recognition. He would have given anything for an Hon. D. Litt at Cambridge, perhaps more for a Fellowship of the British Academy. He never had the slightest chance of either. [...] Bryant of course had gifts. He wrote far better than nearly all professional historians. [...] He over-wrote certainly, and there was often a note of falsity, even of vulgarity, but largely his failure was of intellect.
Plumb's verdict is that Bryant killed off 'patrician history':
- Like Churchill, but unlike Trevelyan, Bryant inflated patrician history so much that he destroyed it. Indeed he vulgarised it to a degree that made it incredible.
Plumb cites Trevelyan's possible heirs as Wedgwood and A. L. Rowse.
Another detractor is the British historian Andrew Roberts, who gave this, his personal verdict:
- Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug.
Roberts's polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed by a full academic study by Julia Stapleton. Bryant's first biographer was Pamela Street, a neighbour in Salisbury and historical collaborator, and daughter of the farmer-author A. G. Street.
[edit] Works
- The Spirit of Conservatism (1929)
- King Charles the Second (1931)
- Macaulay (1932)
- Life of Samuel Pepys in three volumes: The Man in the Making, The Years of Peril, The Saviour of the Navy (1933)
- The Man and the Hour (1934)
- The Letters Speeches and Declarations of King Charles II (1935), editor
- The England of Charles II (1935), later Restoration England
- Postman's Horn, An Anthology of the Letters of Latter Seventeenth Century England (1936), editor
- The American Ideal (1936)
- George V (1936)
- Stanley Baldwin: A Tribute (1937)
- Unfinished Victory (1940)
- English Saga 1840–1940 (1940)
- The Years of Endurance 1793–1802 (1942)
- Dunkirk (A memorial) (1943), pamphlet
- Years of Victory (1944)
- The Battle of Britain. The Few (1944), with Edward Shanks
- Historian's Holiday (1946), Dropmore Press
- Trafalgar and Alamein (1948), with Edward Shanks and Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
- The Summer of Dunkirk and The Great Miracle (1948), with Edward Shanks
- The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (1953)
- The Age of Elegance 1812–1822 (1954)
- The Turn of the Tide 1939–1943 (1957), Alanbrooke diaries
- Triumph In The West 1943–1946 (1959), Alanbrooke diaries
- Liquid History (1960), fifty years of the Port of London Authority
- Jimmy, the Dog of My Life (1960)
- The Age of Chivalry (1963)
- The Medieval Foundation of England (1965)
- The Fire and the Rose: Dramatic Moments in British History (1966)
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Historian's Testament (1969)
- Jackets of Green. A Study of the History, Philosophy and Character of the Rifle Brigade (1972)
- A Thousand Years of British Monarchy (1973)
- Leeds Castle — a Brief History (1980), Leeds Castle Foundation.
- Set in a Silver Sea: A History of Britain and the British People, Vol 1
- The Elizabethan Deliverance, Collins, London, 1980, ISBN 0-00-216207-5
[edit] References
- Maurice Cowling (1975) The Impact of Hitler - British Politics and Policy 1933 - 1940, Cambridge University Press, p.403, ISBN 0-521-20582-4
- J. H. Plumb (1988) The Making of an Historian, I, Ch. VIII, 'The Last Patricians'
- Pamela Street (1979) Arthur Bryant: Portrait of a Historian
- Andrew Roberts (1994), Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant in Eminent Churchillians
- Julia Stapleton (2005) Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain
