Douglas Goldring

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Douglas Goldring (January 7, 1887- April 9, 1960) was an English writer and journalist.

He was born in Greenwich, England. He was educated at Felsted School and then attended Oxford University in 1906. Having inherited a legacy, he left Oxford without a degree, and moved to London to write.

He first took an editorial position at Country Life magazine. He was then in 1908 a sub-editor for English Review edited by Ford Madox Ford (at that time still named Hueffer). Goldring edited his own literary magazine, The Tramp, in 1910, publishing early work by Wyndham Lewis, and the Futurist Marinetti.

From 1912 he was associated with Max Goschen, a troubled London publisher. He there produced Ford's Collected Poems (1913), principally as a financial arrangement. In 1913 he was in close contact with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticist group, helping with getting Blast printed.

He volunteered for the British Army in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, but was discharged for medical reasons. Subsequently he took a more pacifist position on the war. He moved to Ireland, and married there his first wife Betty Duncan; they had two children.

After the war was over, he visited Germany in 1919, for Clarté, Henri Barbusse's organisation.

On returning to London, he intended in 1919 to establish a People’s Theatre Society and publish a series of dramas; but let down D. H. Lawrence, in the end only getting his own Fight for Freedom into print. He was involved in the 1917 Club, a night club at 4 Gerard Street. He witnessed the destruction in 1924 of the John Nash facades on Regent Street, leading to his later interest in the preservation of Georgian period architecture. He spent much of the 1920s on the French Riviera or in Paris. He taught in Gothenburg, Sweden from 1925 to 1927.

He became known mostly as a travel writer. In the late 1930s he came to prominence in two ways. He was Secretary of the Georgian Society, which he helped to found after writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1936, with Lord Derwent and Robert Byron. It became in 1937 the Georgian Group, a section within the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, on the advice of. Lord Esher.

He was also noted, at the same period, as a radical journalist and prolific contributor to left-wing publications. He attacked George Orwell, for Orwell's reporting of the machinations on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In return, Goldring was later on Orwell's notorious list of crypto-Communists.

Douglas Goldring's archive is now in the special collections of the University of Victoria, Canada.

[edit] Works

A Country Boy and other poems (1910)
Ways of Escape. A Book of Adventure (1911)
Streets: a book of London verses (Max Goschen, 1912)
The Permanent Uncle (1912) novel
Dream Cities. Notes of an autumn tour in Italy and Dalmatia (1913) travel
Along France’s River of Romance: The Loire (1913) travel
It's an Ill Wind (1915) novel
In the Town. A Book of London Verses (1916)
The Fortune (1917) novel
Dublin: Explorations and Reflections (1917) as An Englishman
The Black Curtain, novel
Reputations (1920) essays
The Solvent (1920)
Briefe aus der Verbannung (1920)
The Fight for Freedom, a play in four acts. with a preface by Henry Barbusse (1920)
James Elroy Flecker (1922)
Nobody Knows (1923) novel
Gone Abroad - A story of travel chiefly in Italy and The Balearic Isles (1925) travel
Cuckoo (1926) novel
The Merchant of Souls (1926) novel
Northern Lights and Southern Shade (1926) travel
Façade (1928) novel
The French Riviera (1928)
People and Places (1929)
Sardinia: the island of the Nuraghi (1930) travel
Impacts: The Trip to the States and Other Adventures of Travel (1931)
Liberty & Licensing. Hobby Horse Number One (1932) pamphlet
To Portugal (1934)
Royal London (1935)
Odd Man Out (1935) autobiography
Pot Luck in England (1936)
Facing the odds (1940)
Artist Quarter: reminiscences of Montmartre and Montparnasse in the first two decades of the twentieth (1941) by Charles Douglas (Douglas Goldring with Charles Beadle)
South Lodge: reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review circle (1943) memoirs
A Tour In Northumbria (1944)
The Nineteen Twenties (1945)
Journeys in the Sun (1946)
Marching with the Times: 1931-1946 (1947) memoirs
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: a record of the life and writings of Ford Madox Ford (1948)
Life Interests (1948)
Home Ground-A Journey Through the Heart of England (1949)
Foreign Parts: an Autumn Tour in France (1950)
Regency Portrait Painter: the Life of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P. R. A. (1951)
Three Romantic Countries: Reminiscences of travel in Dalmatia, Ireland and Portugal (1951)
The South of France. The Lower Rhone Valley and the Mediterranean Seaboard from Martigues to Menton (1952)
Privileged Persons (1955)