Douglas Goldring
Encyclopedia
Douglas Goldring was a British writer and journalist.

Life

He was born in Greenwich, England. He was educated initially at Hurstpierpoint
Hurstpierpoint College
Hurstpierpoint College is an independent, co-educational, day and boarding school for pupils aged 4–18, located just to the north of the village of Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex in the lee of the South Downs...

, Magdalen College School and for his secondary education Felsted
Felsted School
Felsted School, an English co-educational day and boarding independent school, situated in Felsted, Essex. It is in the British Public School tradition, and was founded in 1564 by Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich who, as Lord Chancellor and Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, acquired...

. He went on to Oxford in 1906; having inherited a legacy he left Oxford without a degree, and moved to London to write.

He first took an editorial position at Country Life
Country Life (magazine)
Country Life is a British weekly magazine, based in London at 110 Southwark Street, and owned by IPC Media, a Time Warner subsidiary.- Topics :The magazine covers the pleasures and joys of rural life, as well as the concerns of rural people...

magazine. He was then in 1908 a sub-editor for English Review edited by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

 (at that time still named Hueffer). Goldring edited his own literary magazine, The Tramp, in 1910, publishing early work by Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

, and the Futurist
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...

 Marinetti.

From 1912 he was associated with Max Goschen, a troubled London publisher. He there produced Ford's Collected Poems (1913), principally as a financial arrangement. In 1913 he was in close contact with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticist group, helping with getting the literary magazine
Literary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

 BLAST printed.

He volunteered for the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

 in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, but was discharged for medical reasons. Subsequently he took a more critical attitude towards the war, from a socialist position. He joined the 1917 Club, the mixed gender Bohemian radical equivalent of a "gentlemen's club", at 4 Gerrard Street, Soho; the name celebrated the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He moved to Dublin, Ireland, and married there his first wife, Betty Duncan; they had two children (the elder, Hugh, was killed as a soldier in World War II).

In 1919 he visited Germany for Clarté, Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.-Life:...

's organisation.

On returning to London, he intended in 1919 to establish a People’s Theatre Society and publish a series of dramas; but let down D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

, in the end only getting his own Fight for Freedom into print. He became more involved in the 1917 Club, meeting there not only the President of the Club, Ramsay Macdonald
Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald, PC, FRS was a British politician who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority government for two terms....

, but also Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...

, C. E. M. Joad
C. E. M. Joad
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher and broadcasting personality. He is most famous for his appearance on The Brains Trust, an extremely popular BBC Radio wartime discussion programme...

, and E. D. Morel
E. D. Morel
Edmund Dene Morel, originally Georges Eduard Pierre Achille Morel de Ville was a British journalist, author and socialist politician. In collaboration with Roger Casement, the Congo Reform Association and others, Morel, in newspapers such as his West African Mail, led a campaign against slavery...

, until it petered out in the 1930s. He witnessed the destruction in 1924 of the John Nash
John Nash (architect)
John Nash was a British architect responsible for much of the layout of Regency London.-Biography:Born in Lambeth, London, the son of a Welsh millwright, Nash trained with the architect Sir Robert Taylor. He established his own practice in 1777, but his career was initially unsuccessful and...

 facades on Regent Street
Regent Street
Regent Street is one of the major shopping streets in London's West End, well known to tourists and Londoners alike, and famous for its Christmas illuminations...

, leading to his later interest in the preservation of Georgian period architecture. He spent much of the 1920s on the French Riviera
French Riviera
The Côte d'Azur, pronounced , often known in English as the French Riviera , is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France, also including the sovereign state of Monaco...

 or in Paris. He taught in Gothenburg
Gothenburg
Gothenburg is the second-largest city in Sweden and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated on the west coast of Sweden, the city proper has a population of 519,399, with 549,839 in the urban area and total of 937,015 inhabitants in the metropolitan area...

, Sweden from 1925 to 1927.

He became known mostly as a travel writer. In the late 1930s he came to prominence in two ways. He was Secretary of the Georgian Society, which he helped to found after writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1936, with Lord Derwent and Robert Byron
Robert Byron
Robert Byron was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana. He was also a noted writer, art critic and historian....

. It became in 1937 the Georgian Group
Georgian Group
The Georgian Group is an English and Welsh conservation organisation created to campaign for the preservation of historic buildings and planned landscapes of the 18th and early 19th centuries...

, a section within the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded by William Morris, Philip Webb and J.J.Stevenson, and other notable members of the Pre Raphaelite brotherhood, in 1877, to oppose what they saw as the insensitive renovation of ancient buildings then occurring in Victorian...

, on the advice of Lord Esher.

He was also noted, at the same period, as a radical journalist and prolific contributor to left-wing publications. He attacked George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...

, for Orwell's reporting of the machinations on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. In return, Goldring was later on Orwell's list of crypto-Communists.

Douglas Goldring's archive is now in the special collections of the University of Victoria
University of Victoria
The University of Victoria, often referred to as UVic, is the second oldest public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It is a research intensive university located in Saanich and Oak Bay, about northeast of downtown Victoria. The University's annual enrollment is about 20,000 students...

, Canada.

Works

  • A Country Boy and other poems (1910)
  • Ways of Escape. A Book of Adventure (1911)
  • Streets: a book of London verses (Max Goschen, 1912)
  • The Permanent Uncle (1912) novel
  • Dream Cities. Notes of an autumn tour in Italy and Dalmatia (1913) travel
  • Along France’s River of Romance: The Loire (1913) travel
  • It's an Ill Wind (1915) novel
  • In the Town. A Book of London Verses (1916)
  • The Fortune (1917) novel including the experience of a fictional conscientious objector
    Conscientious objector
    A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

  • Dublin: Explorations and Reflections (1917) as An Englishman
  • The Black Curtain, novel
  • Reputations (1920) essays
  • The Solvent (1920)
  • Briefe aus der Verbannung (1920)
  • The Fight for Freedom, a play in four acts. with a preface by Henry Barbusse (1920)
  • James Elroy Flecker (1922)
  • Nobody Knows (1923) novel
  • Gone Abroad – A story of travel chiefly in Italy and The Balearic Isles (1925) travel
  • Cuckoo (1926) novel
  • The Merchant of Souls (1926) novel
  • Northern Lights and Southern Shade (1926) travel
  • Façade (1928) novel
  • The French Riviera (1928)
  • People and Places (1929)
  • Sardinia: the island of the Nuraghi (1930) travel
  • Impacts: The Trip to the States and Other Adventures of Travel (1931)
  • Liberty & Licensing. Hobby Horse Number One (1932) pamphlet
  • To Portugal (1934)
  • Royal London (1935)
  • Odd Man Out (1935) autobiography
  • Pot Luck in England (1936)
  • Facing the odds (1940)
  • Artist Quarter: reminiscences of Montmartre and Montparnasse in the first two decades of the twentieth (1941) by Charles Douglas (Douglas Goldring with Charles Beadle)
  • South Lodge: reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review circle (1943) memoirs
  • A Tour In Northumbria (1944)
  • The Nineteen Twenties (1945) retrospect and memoir
  • Journeys in the Sun (1946)
  • Marching with the Times: 1931–1946 (1947) memoirs
  • The Last Pre-Raphaelite: a record of the life and writings of Ford Madox Ford (1948)
  • Life Interests (1948)
  • Home Ground-A Journey Through the Heart of England (1949)
  • Foreign Parts: an Autumn Tour in France (1950)
  • Regency Portrait Painter: the Life of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P. R. A. (1951)
  • Three Romantic Countries: Reminiscences of travel in Dalmatia, Ireland and Portugal (1951)
  • The South of France. The Lower Rhone Valley and the Mediterranean Seaboard from Martigues to Menton (1952)
  • Privileged Persons (1955)

External links

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