James Wentworth Day

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James Wentworth Day (April 21, 1899 – January 5, 1983) was a British writer and occasional broadcaster, firmly of the Agrarian Right school and essentially a High Tory. He lived for most of his life in East Anglia, an area which would always be his first love; he had a particular interest in wildfowling, and at one stage owned Adventurers' Fen, a piece of marshland in Cambridgeshire. He was also a ghost hunter, and wrote several books about this interest. He is possibly most famous for his journey around the farms of East Anglia on horseback during the Second World War, as detailed in his book "Farming Adventure" (latterly reprinted under the title "Wartime Ride"), while for many years he was closely associated with the East Anglian Magazine.

In 1950 and 1951 he was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for the constituency of Hornchurch, now in Greater London but then in Essex, and often spoke on behalf of the Tory cause at elections. He worked for a number of British newspapers, held senior positions at The Field and Country Life, and was both owner and editor of the "Saturday Review". In his youth he served briefly in the First World War, and during the Second World War he worked as a war correspondent in France and as Near East correspondent of the BBC.

An important witness in the Harold Laski libel action of 1946, Wentworth Day briefly achieved minor fame through television in 1957 and 1958, when he appeared as the resident reactionary "rent-a-quote" (to use a term coined more recently) in Daniel Farson's Associated-Rediffusion series, most famously "Out of Step" and "People in Trouble". Farson made it clear that he did not agree with the sentiments, which were often perceived as racist and xenophobic even in the 1950s (in the "People in Trouble" programme on mixed marriages Wentworth Day referred to "coffee-coloured little imps" and claimed that black people must be "inferior" because "a couple of generations ago they were eating each other"), but he usually chuckled along with them and ended them with a remark along the lines of "I completely disagree with you, but at least you say what you really feel".

However, Wentworth Day was soon dropped from Farson's programmes after he claimed, while contributing to a programme on transvestism, that all homosexuals should be hung. Farson, petrified that Wentworth Day would sense his own homosexuality and possibly land him in prison, insisted that the programme on transvestism should be scrapped, theoretically because the Independent Television Authority would ban it anyway (not normally a concern for Farson) but in reality because he was worried about the possible consequences.

Despite his increasingly outmoded views on racial matters, Wentworth Day continued to write until shortly before his death, which came very soon after two Daniel Farson programmes in which he expressed his opinions had been repeated on the fledgling Channel 4 (clips of Wentworth Day's comments were later shown in Victor Lewis-Smith's Buygones and TV Offal). It should be mentioned that, despite his racial prejudices, Wentworth Day also held a set of views in support of traditional farming methods and in opposition to pesticides which are now more widely held on the Left than on the Right; these were expressed in his 1957 book "Poison On The Land".

After several unsuccessful engagements, he married New Zealander Marion McLean in 1943; they had one daughter.

[edit] Books

Note: the list below is probably incomplete and some of the dates may be inaccurate, although accuracy has been strived for at all times.

• Farming Adventure: A Thousand Miles Through England On A Horse (date unknown)
• The Modern Fowler (date unknown)
• King George V as a Sportsman (date unknown)
• The Life of Sir Henry Segrave (date unknown)
• Harvest Adventure (date unknown)
• Sport in Egypt (date unknown)
• Gamblers' Gallery (date unknown)
• Wild Wings and Some Footsteps (1948)
• Marshland Adventure (1950)
• Broadland Adventure (1951)
• The New Yeomen of England (1952)
• The Modern Shooter (1952)
• Norwich and the Broads (1953)
• A History of the Fens (1954)
• The Wisest Dogs in the World: Some Account of the Longshaw Sheepdog Trials Association (1954)
• Here Are Ghosts And Witches (1954)
• They Walk The Wild Places (1956)
• Poison On The Land: The War On Wild Life, And Some Remedies (1957)
• The Angler's Pocket Book (1957)
• The Dog Lover's Pocket Book (1957)
• A Ghost Hunter's Game Book (1958)
• British Animals of the Wild Places (1960)
• British Birds of the Wild Places (1961)
• HRH Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent: The First Authentic Life Story (1962)
• Portrait of the Broads (1967)
• The Queen Mother's Family Story (1967)
• In Search of Ghosts (1969)
• History of the Fens (1970)
• Rum Owd Boys (1974)
• Norwich Through The Ages (1976)
• King's Lynn and Sandringham Through The Ages (1977)
• Garland of Hops (1978)
• The James Wentworth Day Book of Essex (1979)

[edit] Quote

"I confess it. I do not like modern furniture or much of modern architecture, less or none of modern art and little of modern literature. I am, of course, an antediluvian, a reactionary, an out-of-date or, as I prefer it, a rural romanticist." - Wild Wings and Some Footsteps, 1948.