Philip Mairet

Philip Mairet ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; full name: Philippe Auguste Mairet;<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 27 April 1886 – 9 February 1975) was a British designer, writer and journalist. He had a wide range of interest: crafts, Alfred Adler and psychiatry, and Social Credit. He translated major figures including Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote biographies of Sir Patrick Geddes and A. R. Orage, with both of whom he was closely associated, as well as of John Middleton Murry. As editor of the New English Weekly in the 1930s, he championed both Christian socialism, as it was known at the time, and ideas on agriculture that would come together later as organic farming.<ref>Phillip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001), chapter Philip Mairet and the New English Weekly.</ref>

Early life

He was born in Islington, London, on 27 April 1886, the son of Charles Sylvain Mairet, a Swiss watchmaker, and his wife Mary Ann Goldsmith. He was educated at a board school and the Stationers' Company's School.<ref name="ODNB">Template:Cite ODNB</ref>

Mairet studied at the Hornsey School of Art, becoming a draughtsman and designer of stained glass.<ref>Eric Homberger, Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (1997), p. 332.</ref> Failing to enter the Royal Academy Schools, he took a job in advertising.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He went to work in graphic design for Charles Robert Ashbee and joined his Arts and Crafts community at Chipping Campden.<ref>(PDF) Template:Webarchive, p. 3.</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Marriage, Mitrinović and Ditchling

Mairet married in 1913, and with his wife Ethel moved away from Chipping Campden. They lived in a cottage at Shottery: Ethel worked as a weaver, and Mairet for Burlison and Grylls. In 1914 Mairet met and was influenced by Dimitrije Mitrinović, attached to the Serbian Delegation.<ref name="ODNB"/> In the summer of 1915 he prepared wall lecture diagrams for a summer course on The War: Its Social Tasks and Problems at King's College, London. The course was given by Patrick Geddes and Gilbert Slater.<ref name="ODNB"/><ref>Stephen, Walter (2020), On the Trail of Patrick Geddes, Luath Press Ltd., p. 95</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

At the end of 1915 Mairet joined the Red Cross Society.<ref name="ODNB"/> In An Autobiographical Compilation, he described his time serving in the Red Cross personnel in France, and catching up with Mitrinović when on leave in England. In 1917 he had a revelatory experience, after which he described himself as a disciple, and resigned from the Red Cross.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Mairet and his wife moved to Ditchling, Sussex, where they settled. Mairet took on work as an agricultural labourer, on the farm that Hilary Pepler and his wife had bought on the edge of Ditchling Common.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In so doing, Mairet was avoiding conscripted military service. Eventually he was discovered, and enrolled in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He was sentenced by a court-martial having refused to obey orders, and spent a period in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector. He was released in 1919, and returned to Ditchling where Ethel was a successful weaver; there Mitrinović visited.<ref name="ODNB"/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Luisa Passerini, Europe in love, love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain Between the Wars (1999), p. 773.</ref>

From 1921 to 1924 Mairet worked as an actor at the Old Vic.<ref>Simon Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: a Biography (2006), pp. 144-5.</ref> In 1926 he turned to journalism.<ref name="TSELetters">Template:Cite book</ref>

The New English Weekly circle

Mairet began going to the editorial meetings of A. R. Orage after World War I, where the so-called New Age circle attended, The New Age being Orage's magazine.<ref>"And after the war, Edwin Muir, Herbert Read, Michael Arlen, Denis Saurat, Janko Lavrin, and Philip Mairet, to mention a few, attended regularly." (PDF), p. 43.</ref> In 1922 Orage quit as its editor, going abroad to study at and work in the Gurdjieff Institute.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> From 1930 to 1934, Mairet edited with W. Travers Symons Purpose, a quarterly magazine founded in 1929, mixing Social Credit ideas with Alfred Adler's.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1930 Orage was rebuffed when he offered to return to The New Age, by the controlling Anglicans who now ran it, known as the "Chandos Group", who were Christian socialists.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

During the 1930s, there were changes in Mairet's life. His marriage broke down; he threw off the influence of Mitrinović; and he changed the spelling of his first name from Philippe to Philip.<ref name="ODNB"/> Orage set up the New English Weekly in 1932.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He died suddenly in 1934, leaving the publication in limbo. The editorial line, as legacy from Orage, was Social Credit in the sense of the Economic Freedom League, a faction led by H. E. B. Ludlam; and approval of Oswald Mosley.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Mairet, in 1934 the literary editor of the New English Weekly, emerged as its editor as a compromise candidate. One group of Social Credit advocates wanted to exclude another group, of supporters of Mitrinović. Mairet was identified more with a third force, the Chandos Group. They took their name from the Chandos Restaurant in St Martin's Lane, where they met.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The Chandos Group overlapped the Mitrinović group: there had been a shared interest in the journal Purpose; and the theories of Adler were also a common factor.<ref>Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-century Britain (2006), p. 91.</ref> W. Travers Symons introduced Mairet to T. S. Eliot, who was holding the ring.<ref name = Harding/> In practical terms the Chandos Group were already deeply involved in producing the New English Weekly, and were sympathetic to Social Credit.<ref>Peter Barberis, John McHugh, and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations (2000), p. 80.</ref>

Associations

The Chandos group was founded by Mitrinović, meeting for the first time on the last day of the 1926 General Strike.<ref name="PECS">Template:Cite book</ref> It later centred on Maurice Reckitt, with Mairet, W. Travers Symons, V. A. Demant, and Alan Porter.<ref name = Harding>Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), pp. 191-2.</ref> Albert Newsome, Alan Porter and Egerton Swan attended, while working up Coal: A Challenge to the National Conscience. Others were B. T. Boothroyd, Hilderic Edwin Cousens, Geoffrey Davis the Distributist, and R. S. J. Rand. G. D. H. Cole, T. S. Eliot and Lewis Mumford were occasionally at the meetings, which occurred once every two weeks.<ref name="PECS"/>

Mairet belonged to other small societies and discussion groups of the period before World War II. Those included Oldham's Moot.<ref>Marjorie Reeves (editor), Christian Thinking and Social Order: Conviction Politics from the 1930s to the Present Day (1999), p, 25.</ref> Mairet wrote a piece "The Gospel, Drama, and Society" for Oldham's Christian News-Letter series;<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Pepler wrote a reply to it on "training the imagination".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Mairet was an early supporter of George Orwell, who wrote to the New English Weekly in May 1932, and was given a book by Karl Adam to review.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He wrote in positive and comprehending terms about Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's approach.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He was a friend and long-time correspondent of T. S. Eliot, who dedicated his Notes towards the Definition of Culture to him.<ref>Alzina Stone Dale, T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet (2004), p. 170.</ref> The work's title harked back to a seminar series Eliot and Mairet had run in the winter 1943/4, at St Anne's House, under the title "Towards the Definition of a Culture". The House was attached to St Anne's Church, Soho, bombed out in two air raids in autumn 1940.<ref name="Kojecký">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In December 1938 the magazine New Pioneer was launched, a far right publication associated with Viscount Lymington. Mairet was one of the group of its supporters, with John Beckett, Ben Greene, Anthony Ludovici and many of those who formed the British People's Party (1939) shortly afterwards.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He joined Rolf Gardiner's Kinship in Husbandry group in 1941.<ref>Julie V. Gottlieb, Thomas P. Linehan, The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain (2004), p. 187.</ref>

For Walter Moberly's Christian Frontier Council, Mairet edited The Frontier (1951).<ref>(PDF) Template:Webarchive, p. 21.</ref> Also for the Christian Frontier Council, he organised a symposium Christianity and Psychiatry, and edited its proceedings as Christian Essays in Psychiatry (1956).<ref name="TSELetters"/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Brian Harrison recorded an oral history interview with Mairet, in May 1974, as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>  Mairet talks about his introduction to women's suffrage, the WSPU and Maude Royden.

Works

Mairet did the drawings for Ashbee's re-design of the Norman Chapel House in Broad Campden, and the 1907 commission for Thomas Shaw-Hellier's Villa San Giorgio in Taormina.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>University of Bradford Archive Reference: GB 0532 MAI. Letter from Mairet to Tom Heron dated 12 June 1971. "A highlight of his holiday was a visit to the Villa San Giorgio in Taormina, for which he executed the perspective drawings when working in C.R. Ashbee's office at Chipping Campden."</ref> Fiona MacCarthy, the biographer of the architect, judges it "the most impressive of Ashbee's remaining buildings";<ref>MacCarthy, Fiona.The Simple Life: C.R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds. University of California Press, 1981. Chapter 7, "The death of Conradin"</ref> it survives as the Hotel Ashbee. Mairet also illustrated Ashbee's Conradin: A Philosophical Ballad (1908).

Biography

• A. R. Orage: a memoir (1936)
• Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes (1957)
• John Middleton Murry (1958)

Essays and pamphlets

• An essay on crafts & obedience (1918), with Hilary Pepler
• The Idea Behind Craftsmanship (1928)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Aristocracy and the Meaning of Class Rule – An Essay upon Aristocracy Past and Future (1931)
• The Frontier (1951)
• Christian Essays in Psychiatry (1956) editor

Social Credit

• The Douglas Manual: Being a Recension of Passages from the Works of Major C. H. Douglas, Outlining Social Credit (Stanley Nott, 1934) editor<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Alfred Adler

• ABC of Adler's psychology (1928)
• Alfred Adler Problems of Neurosis (1929) editor, case histories

Translations

Mairet's numerous translations to English included L'existentialisme est un humanisme by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Calvin by François Wendel (1905–1972).<ref name="Kojecký"/>

Family

The woman Mairet married, Ethel Mary Partridge, was an influential hand loom weaver<ref>http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990109/ai_n9656407 Template:Dead link</ref> and teacher. She was born in 1872 and, in 1903, married Ananda Coomaraswamy, the geologist and art historian. Mairet worked on their house and became Coomaraswamy's secretary. <ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The Coomaraswamy marriage broke down, and the couple divorced in 1910.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>