Philip Mairet

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Philip Mairet (French: [m]; full name: Philippe Auguste Mairet;
[1]
18861975) was a designer, writer and journalist. He had a wide range of
interest: crafts, Alfred Adler and psychiatry, and Social Credit. He was also a
translator of major gures including Sartre. He wrote biographies of Sir Patrick
Geddes and A. R. Orage, with both of whom he was closely associated.
Although inuenced largely by the example of Orage, a follower of Gurdjie,
Mairet was in later life an Anglican Christian. As editor of the New English
Weekly in the 1930s, he championed both Christian socialism (in the sense of
Maurice Reckitt, a friend), as it was known at the time, and ideas on agriculture
that would come together later as organic farming.
[2]
Life
He was educated at the Hornsey School of Art, becoming a draughtsman and
designer of stained glass.
[3]
As a young man he worked in graphic design for
Charles Robert Ashbee, becoming part of his community at Chipping Campden,
[4][5]
and illustrating Conradin: A Philosophical Ballad (1908). He then worked for
Patrick Geddes.
His wife Ethel Mairet (18721952) (previously married to Ananda
Coomaraswamy) was an inuential weaver
[6]
and teacher, settled in Ditchling,
Sussex and was associated with The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. She was
born Ethel Mary Partridge and trained at the Royal Academy of Music; her
marriage to Coomaraswamy lasted from 1903 to 1913.
[7]
They met because Philip
had come to Ditchling to work as a labourer.
[8]
He was avoiding conscripted
military service during World War I, and developed an interest in glass-making.
He was that at time inuenced by Dimitrije Mitrinovi, attached to the Serbian
Delegation in London, who met Mairet in 1917. Eventually Mairet was discovered,
enrolled in the British Army, and spent a period in prison.
[9]
From 1921 to 1924 he worked as an actor, at the Old Vic.
[10]
He began attending
Orage's editorial meetings.
[11]
Orage died suddenly in 1934, leaving the New English Weekly in limbo. Mairet,
then the literary editor, emerged as the editor by a complex route: one group of
Social Credit advocates wanted to exclude another group, of supporters of
Mitrinovi. Mairet was identied more with a third faction, the Chandos Group,
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around Maurice Reckitt, with Travers Symons, V. A. Demant, and Alan Porter.
[12]
This overlapped the Mitrinovi group: there had been a shared interest in the
journal Purpose, from 1929, and the theories of Adler were also a common
factor.
[13]
Symons introduced Mairet to T. S. Eliot, who was holding the ring.
[12]
In practical terms the Chandos Group were already deeply involved in producing
the New English Weekly, and were sympathetic to Social Credit.
[14]
He belonged to numerous other small societies and discussion groups of the
period before World War II.
[15]
He joined Rolf Gardiner's Kinship in Husbandry
group in 1941.
[16]
He edited The Frontier for Walter Moberly's Christian Frontier
Council.
[17]
He was an early supporter of George Orwell, giving him literary work for the New
English Weekly, and writing in very positive and comprehending terms about
Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's approach. A friend and long-time
correspondent also of T. S. Eliot, who dedicated his Notes towards the Denition
of Culture to Mairet,
[18]
he became one of the best-connected of all the British
Christian intellectuals of that time.
Works
An essay on crafts & obedience (1918), Douglas Pepler
ABC of Adler's psychology (1928)
Alfred Adler Problems of Neurosis (1929) editor, case histories
Aristocracy and the Meaning of Class Rule An Essay upon Aristocracy Past
and Future (1931)
The Douglas Manual: Being a Recension of Passages from the Works of Major
C. H. Douglas, Outlining Social Credit (Stanley Nott, 1934) editor
A. R. Orage: a memoir (1936)
The Frontier (1951)
Christian Essays in Psychiatry (1956) editor
Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes (1957)
John Middleton Murry (1958)
Notes
^ http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6350178M 1.
^ Phillip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001), chapter Philip Mairet 2.
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and the New English Weekly.
^ Eric Homberger, Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (1997), p. 332. 3.
^ (PDF) (http://www.bahs.org.uk/46n2a5.pdf), p. 3. 4.
^ http://www.research-design.co.uk/page.php?publication=2&volume=41&page=289 5.
^ http://ndarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990109/ai_n9656407 6.
^ http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/learning/learndex.php?theme_id=cscu1&
theme_record_id=cscu1mairet&mtri=cscu1text
7.
^ Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (1989), pp. 139.140. 8.
^ Luisa Passerini, Europe in love, love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain
Between the Wars (1999), p. 773.
9.
^ Simon Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Bareld: Romanticism Come of Age: a Biography
(2006), pp. 144-5.
10.
^ And after the war, Edwin Muir, Herbert Read, Michael Arlen, Denis Saurat, Janko
Lavrin, and Philip Mairet, to mention a few, attended regularly. (PDF)
(http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/pdf/martin03.pdf), p. 43.
11.
^
a b
Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in
Inter-War Britain (2002), pp. 191-2.
12.
^ Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in
Twentieth-century Britain (2006), p. 91.
13.
^ Peter Barberis, John McHugh, and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish
Political Organizations (2000), p. 80.
14.
^ These included Oldham's Moot: Marjorie Reeves (editor), Christian Thinking and
Social Order: Conviction Politics from the 1930s to the Present Day (1999), p, 25.
15.
^ Julie V. Gottlieb, Thomas P. Linehan, The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far
Right in Britain (2004), p. 187.
16.
^ (PDF) (http://www.bahs.org.uk/49n2a4.pdf), p. 21. 17.
^ Alzina Stone Dale, T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet (2004), p. 170. 18.
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Categories: British journalists 1886 births 1975 deaths
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