The Duke of Bedford. Total Disarmament or an International Police Force? Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1944. Or false a dichotomy? Bedford was a pacifist and (maybe) a fascist. Here he is the author of a twelve-page pamphlet which originally sold for 2d. and which I bought for ... much more than 2d.! If I'd known I could have ILLed it instead.
Adrian Gregory. The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Took a little while to get out here; looks like it was worth the wait.
-
The Strickland Press, which published the Duke of Bedford pamphlet, was operated by an anarchist named Guy Aldred. I think I read somewhere that Aldred got a lot of grief from some of his comrades for his association with a member of the peerage. I suppose the Duke got a lot of grief as well within his own circles for his association with an anarchist. Aldred was a bit of an unorthodox anarchist, he repeatedly ran for Parliament, usually racking up vote totals in the low hundreds. The Strickland Press was started in 1939 with the money from a bequest to Aldred from a Sir Walter Strickland (who was a baronet, not a knight) who had died the previous year. Aldred had earlier carried on publishing activities on a smaller scale under the imprint Bakunin Press.
A picture of the Strickland Press premises (which included a bookstore) in about 1945 is here:
-
Thanks! I thought there might be a story there, but you've saved me the effort. Bedford seems to have been a rather idiosyncratic figure; Social Credit, anti-Semitism, pacifism, fascism and birds all crop up in accounts of him. His son described him as 'The loneliest man I ever knew, incapable of giving or receiving love, utterly self-centred and opinionated. He loved birds, animals, peace, monetary reform, the park and religion' (according Wikipedia). So it's somehow not surprising to find him hanging around with anarchists too.
Reply
Free e-books
Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938
EPUB format
MOBI format
PDF format
The Scareship Age, 1892-1946
EPUB format
MOBI format
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://airminded.org/2009/05/29/acquisitions-73/trackback/