Esmond Romilly

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 unimaginable 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]

Mosley at about the time of his meeting with Romilly

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]

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] That 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 pacifism. However, he was determined to convert "at least 20 Wellingtonians" to the new creed.[31]

During the following months Esmond engaged in various 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 against 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 vacation 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]

The fugitive Romilly found his way to Parton Street and set up his headquarters there, amid considerable press interest and speculation: "Mr Churchill's Nephew Vanishes" was a typical headline.[50] The Sunday Express paid Romilly seven guineas for his story[51] (£7.35, equivalent to nearly £500 in 2017 terms).[52] Archer agreed to pay him a wage of £1 a week to help in the shop; on these sparse resources Romilly set about preparing the first issue of Out of Bounds.[37]

The first issue was published on 25 March 1934. Romilly had been assiduous in developing a distribution network "in every cloister and dormitory he could reach",[37] and had acquired a wide selection of contributions, so that the magazine ran to 35 pages. His own contributions included a fiery editorial, an article on the arms race and a rebuttal of a defence of fascism supplied from Oundle School. There were poems, some literary criticism, a letters page, an article on conditions in girls' schools, and some humorous send-ups of public school life. Despite the relatively moderate overall tone, the Daily Mail denounced the magazine as a "Reds' New Attack" and quoted from the editorial: "We shall infuriate every schoolmaster over 30 (and some under) throughout England".[53]

On 14 April the organisation of Out of Bounds was formalised when a meeting of some 16 delegates from a range of schools appointed a permanent editorial board under Romilly's chairmanship.[54] Next day this board marched to Hyde Park, as part of a demonstration against the National Government's budget policy, under a banner denouncing the "National Government of Hunger, Fascism and War". This was duly reported in the press, ever eager to record the doings of Mr Churchill's nephew.[55] On 7 June, in the company of his new acolyte Philip Toynbee from Rugby School,[n 5] Romilly attended a large Blackshirts rally at London's Olympia, from which they were roughly ejected, Toynbee sustaining mild injuries.[57] By this time, Romilly was becoming disenchanted with the Parton Street ambience,[58] and was seeking a rapprochement with his family from whom he had been estranged since his flight from Wellington. In this mood he agreed to return to school, not to Wellington but to the progressive, coeducational school Bedales.[59] He continued his work with Out of Bounds, the second edition of which appeared on 2 July.[60][n 6] Romilly began at Bedales on 9 June and spent the remainder of the summer term there. In his letters home he professed to like the school,[62] but the feeling was not reciprocated towards him. "This is a boy who can contribute nothing to this school and to whom this school can contribute nothing", was the headmaster's bleak assessment when Romilly departed from the school at the end of July.[63]

Romilly spent the summer and autumn months quietly, in London, subsisting on a small allowance from his father.[64] He had largely lost interest in the magazine, although he continued to contribute; the third issue appeared in November without creating a stir, much of it consisting of what Ingram calls tame repetition.[65] He began a new project, with his brother Giles, in the form of a book in which the pair recounted and analysed their experiences of school.[66] Much of the 1934–35 winter was spent by Romilly in writing his part of the combined work, which Hamish Hamilton agreed to publish.[67] This period of responsible endeavour was interrupted in late December 1934 by a drunken incident which resulted in Romilly's arrest and detention in a remand home for several weeks, from which he was eventually released on a year's probation.[68][69]

The book Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly was published in June 1935, to a generally favourable reception, and sold well enough to run to a second edition. Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman found the book "candid and surprisingly fair"; even the Daily Mail conceded that the young authors had literary ability.[70] The Observer's books critic remarked that the book might tell the true story,[71] rather than the exaggerated accounts evident from the magazine – which the brothers opportunistically brought out in a fourth and final edition to coincide with the book's publication. The centrepiece of this last issue was a frank article on masturbation, supposedly contributed by a doctor.[72]

In New York, the Romillys settled in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Mitford found a job in a New York fashion house,[110] and Romilly attempted without success to work as a freelance journalist. Eventually, he found a position in an advertising firm, Topping & Lloyd; the post, a well-paid sinecure, lasted until August 1939 and enabled the couple to acquire a second-hand car and sufficient capital to embark on a tour of America.[111] In Washington, DC, Romilly signed a contract with The Washington Post to provide a series of articles recounting their adventures under the title "Baby Bluebloods in Hobohemia".[112] The winter of 1939–1940 was spent in Miami, where Romilly borrowed $1,000 to acquire the licence to run the Roma bar.[113] The plan was to continue the tour in the spring, westward, Romilly hoped to find work on a ranch before he moved to Hollywood and finally Chicago.[114] However, by May 1940, the war news from Europe (the Second World War had broken out in September 1939) was serious enough for the Romillys to abandon their tour and return to Washington, where Romilly volunteered for service with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).[115]

Romilly departed for Canada to begin training, first at Toronto and later at Regina, Saskatchewan,[116] while Mitford remained in Washington, pregnant with her second child (a daughter, Constancia, was born on 9 February 1941).[117] Meanwhile, Romilly's training did not run smoothly. In November 1940 he was disqualified from aircrew duties because of a previously-undetected radical mastoidectomy and discharged from the RCAF. However, he obtained an immediate reinstatement to train as an air observer at Malton, Ontario.[118] In the summer of 1941, on the completion of his training, he was posted to England, where he was attached to No. 58 Squadron RAF as a navigator with the rank of pilot officer. On 30 November 1941, while participating in a raid on Hamburg, Romilly's aircraft failed to return and was lost over the North Sea with all on board.[2] Air-sea rescue operations begun out the following morning could find no trace of the craft or any survivors, and on 3 December, the search was abandoned.[119] Mitford was notified by telegram on 1 December.[120]