Acquisitions

29 May 2009 in Acquisitions, Books, Ephemera by Brett Holman | 2 comments

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.

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  1. Nemo’s avatar

    Nemo on 30 May 2009 at 10:44 am

    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:

    http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSS00041

  2. Brett Holman’s avatar

    Brett Holman on 30 May 2009 at 4:43 pm

    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.