Arthur Bryant

This article is about the historian and columnist. For the restaurant, see Arthur Bryant's. For the restaurateur, see Arthur Bryant (restaurateur).
Sir Arthur Bryant
Born 18 February 1899
Dersingham, England
Died 22 January 1985 (aged 85)
Wiltshire, England
Occupation Historian, colunmist

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985), was an English historian, columnist for the Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles and his books were devoured by the ruling elite; he was the favourite historian of at least three prime ministers: Churchill, Attlee, and Wilson.

Bryant's historiography was often based on an English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealised agrarian past. He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of "fools" and "knaves".[1]

Early life

Arthur Bryant was the son of Sir Francis Morgan Bryant, who was the chief clerk to the Prince of Wales, and wife May. His father would later hold a number of offices in the royal secretariat, eventually becoming registrar of the Royal Victorian Order. Arthur grew up in a house bordering the Buckingham Palace gardens near the Royal Mews. There he developed a feel for the trappings of traditional British protocol and a strong attachment to the history of England.[2]

He attended school at Pelham House, Sandgate, and Harrow School. Though he expected to join the British Army, he won in 1916 a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Despite that, he joined the Royal Flying Corps the following year, as a pilot officer.[2] While there, he served in the first squadron to bomb the cities of the Rhineland in World War I. He was also for a time the only British subject formally attached to an American pilot unit, a unit which had been sent overseas for training.[3]

In 1919 he studied modern history at Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining distinction in the honours courses offered to ex-servicemen in 1920.[2]

Early adult life

Bryant started work at a school operated by the London County Council, where he developed a strong sense of social justice and became convinced that education would be an effective way of uniting the people. This conviction led him to become a historian. Tall, dark, and attractive, he was popular at the debutante balls he regularly attended, where he often persuaded his dancing partners to help him teach some of the less fortunate children at a children's library he had established in Dickens's old house in Somers Town, London.[2][3]

He became a barrister at the Inner Temple in 1923, but left later that year[2] to take the headmaster position of the Cambridge School of Arts, Crafts, and Technology, becoming the youngest headmaster in England. Altogether he proved remarkably successful in enrolling students, growing from three hundred to two thousand students in his three years there.[3] During 1926 he married Sylvia Mary Shakerley, daughter of Walter Geoffrey Shakerley, the third Baronet Shakerley, and the following year became a lecturer in history for the Oxford University delegacy for extramural studies, a position he retained until 1936. His marriage was dissolved in 1930. He also served as an advisor at the Bonar Law College at Ashridge. His first book, The Spirit of Conservatism, appeared in 1929 and was written with his former students in mind.[2]

Historian

1930s

In 1929, after cataloguing the Shakerley family library, he was asked by a friend in publishing to produce a new biography of Charles II of England. Yale Professor Frank W. Notestein suggested that he begin the work with Charles's escape following the Battle of Worcester, incorporating details of his earlier life into the narrative thereafter. This dramatic opening led the Book Society to choose it as their October 1931 selection, and it became a best-seller. Bryant's success with this volume encouraged him, and he remained in that field. The book has been described as being both readable and informed by solid scholarship.[2] He also regularly began producing pageants. These included the Cambridge, Oxford, and Hyde Park pageants, and the Naval Night Pageant in Greenwich, which was attended by the King, Queen, Prince of Wales, British Cabinet, and members of the World Economic Conference. For the quality of his work in this field, he was acclaimed "the English Reinhardt".[3]

He helped found the National Book Association, and its subsidiary, the Right Book Club, as an alternative to the Left Book Club. The new organisation was not outstandingly successful, however, although it did publish several of his own writings. In January 1939 the National Book Club published a new English edition of Mein Kampf, for which Bryant wrote a foreword praising Hitler (with reservations: he denounced Nazi persecution of Jews) and comparing him to Benjamin Disraeli.

His next book was a three-volume biography of Samuel Pepys, completed in 1938 and regarded as "one of the great historical biographies in the language" by John Kenyon.[2] Almost three-quarters of a century after its publication it remains an important guide to Pepys's career.

Bryant also was a frequent contributor to London papers and magazines, and scripted radio broadcasts relating to his historical interests, as well as radio plays for the BBC. He published a collection of scripts in his book The National Character.[2]

1940s

Unfinished Victory was a book which Bryant had published in January 1940; it dealt with recent German history, and explained sympathetically how Germany had rebuilt herself after World War I. Bryant asserted that certain German Jews had benefited from the economic crises and controlled the national wealth, and although he criticised the destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, he declared that the Third Reich might produce "a newer and happier Germany in the future".[4] Initially most reviewers received the book positively, but after the 'phoney war' ended, public and elite opinion turned sharply against appeasement of any sort. Bryant realised his mistake in proposing a compromise and tried to buy up unsold copies.[5]

After the fall of France in 1940, Bryant's writing celebrated British patriotism. His English Saga, published at the end of that year, described England as "an island fortress … fighting a war of redemption, not only for Europe but for her own soul".[6] Roberts says of his popular essays and books, "Bryant did a superb job in helping to stiffen the people's resolve by putting their sacrifices in historical context."[7]

He married again, in 1941, to Anne Elaine Brooke, daughter of Bertram Willes Dayrell Brooke, one of the White Rajahs of Sarawak. His books during this decade dealt less prominently with the 17th century, and included a collection of Neville Chamberlain's speeches.[3]

His works during this period were well-received for their style and readability, although they also tended to be less well-researched, which has caused them to be questioned by younger historians. Several of these works, including English Saga (1940), The Years of Endurance 1793–1802 (1942), and Years of Victory, 1802–1812, drew notable criticism, particularly for his preoccupation with comparing Napoleon and Hitler. The shortcomings of these works, possibly combined with their unusual popularity, helped ensure that he never received the highest academic honours.[2]

1950s

His single major work in the decade was a two-volume collection of Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke's diaries with additional commentary, The Turn of the Tide (1957) and The Triumph in the West (1959). These books created substantial controversy, given their criticism of Churchill, who was then at the height of his popularity. They are still considered essential reading for understanding the British military during the war.[2][8]

Later years

Bryant's grave in Salisbury Cathedral

The books he wrote during his later years included several volumes of broad English histories. They include Set in a Silver Sea (1984), Freedom's Own Island (1986, edited posthumously by John Kenyon, and a third volume.[2]

He retained a large readership and was guest-of-honour at the Conservative Monday Club's 1966 annual dinner. He spoke on "The Preservation of our National Character". The dinner, at the Savoy Hotel, was sold out.

During the 1960s Bryant was knighted and made a Companion of Honour. J. H. Plumb wrote, "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."[9]

His second marriage dissolved in 1976. He died nine years later, and his ashes were buried in Salisbury Cathedral.

Legacy

Bryant's total output was remarkable. He wrote over forty books overall, which collectively sold over two million copies. Most were published by William Collins, Sons and Co. Ltd.[2] Also, in collaboration with W. P. Lipscomb, he wrote a play dramatising Pepys' life which ran for one hundred and fifty performances in London. He was a frequent lecturer, speaking at many of the leading cities and schools in Great Britain, as well as in the United States and fourteen European countries. His public speeches included the 1935 Alfred Watson lectures sponsored by the Sulgrave Manor Trust. These lectures, on American history, literature, and biography, were later collected into the book The American Ideal.[3]

In 1936, Bryant took over G. K. Chesterton's "Our Note Book" column for the Illustrated London News. (Bryant paid tribute to Chesterton in his introduction to Chesterton's posthumously-published essay collection The Glass Walking-Stick.) He continued writing this column until his death, which occurred almost half a century after Chesterton's. Overall, Bryant produced about 2.7 million words for that magazine.[2]

Controversy

Andrew Roberts claims that Bryant's work on Samuel Pepys gave insufficient credit to the scholarly work of Joseph Robson Tanner (1860–1931).[10] J. H. Plumb gives this account 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.[11]

Roberts also claimed that Bryant remained in indirect contact with the Nazis in early 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, and that these ties had been requested by the Foreign Secretary.[12]

Comparing his pre-World War II support of appeasement and admiration of Nazi Germany with his patriotic writings after the war began, Julian T. Jackson wrote that

Had British history taken a different turn in 1940, it is all too easy to imagine Bryant playing the same hagiographical role towards whoever might have become the British Pétain as he did towards Churchill. In different circumstances he would probably have become a British equivalent of René Benjamin, the writer notorious for his works of obsequious flattery of Pétain after 1940.[6]

Although professional historians were frequently negative about his best-sellers, Bryant's histories were explicitly praised by prime ministers Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher.[13]

Critical reception

J. H. Plumb, one of Bryant's detractors, wrote:

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.[9]

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.[14]

Roberts's polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed (and rebutted) by Julia Stapleton's full academic study. Bryant's first biographer was Pamela Street, a neighbour of his in Salisbury, who on occasion had collaborated with Bryant in his historical works, and who was a daughter of farmer-author A. G. Street. Her book appeared during Bryant's lifetime.

Works

References

  1. ↑ Soffer (2009) p 127
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 Lord Blake and C. S. Nicholls, ed. (1990). The Dictionary of National Biography, 1981 – 1985. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-865210-0.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Kunitz, Stanley J. with Vineta Colby, ed. (1955). Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company.
  4. ↑ Reba N. Soffer, "History, historians, and conservatism in Britain and America: the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan", Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 165.
  5. ↑ Richard Griffiths, "The reception of Bryant's Unfinished Victory: insights into British public opinion in early 1940", Patterns of Prejudice vol 38 issue 1 (March 2004), pages 18 – 36.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Jackson, Julian (2001). France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. Oxford University Press. p. 112. ISBN 0-19-820706-9.
  7. ↑ Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994) pp. 287, quote p 317
  8. ↑ Kurt Hanson and Robert L. Beisner, eds. American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (2nd ed. 2003) vol 1 p 982
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Plumb 1988, p. 276
  10. ↑ Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994) pp. 289–90
  11. ↑ Plumb 1988, p. 275
  12. ↑ Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994) p. 310
  13. ↑ Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994) p. 322
  14. ↑ Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994)

Further reading

External links