BR TO ALYS RUSSELL, 2 AUG. 1950
BRACERS 21827. ALS(X). Camellia Collections. SLBR 2: #500
Edited by A.G. Bone and N. Griffin. Reviewed by S. Turcon

Menzies Hotel,
Melbourne.1
2.8.50

Dearest Alys2

Thanks for thy letter. I am sorry my birthday letter3 did not arrive in time. I sent it in the diplomatic bag and was assured it would. I am glad thy broadcast was such a success.4

My life here is intolerably busy, as I have to see innumerable people in addition to lectures, broadcasts, and newspaper articles. I long to be home. Tomorrow I go to Adelaide, thence to Alice Springs (in the middle),5 and thence to Perth. I get home (if Stalin permits) on the 27th. I enclose a cutting giving part of an average day.6 People here are cordial but uninteresting. I spent last week-end on a sheep station. The owner had 10,000 acres and 10,000 sheep. He had been at Jesus (Cambridge) but failed to get a degree. His wife7 had been at Hollywood in the movies. The country was so monotonous that I couldn’t imagine how people found their way.

Thine ever
B.

Notes

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from a photocopy of the signed original among the papers of Alys Russell’s great-niece, Barbara Halpern, now in the possession of Camellia Collections, London. The reproduction indicates that the letter was written in BR’s hand on the recto and verso of a single leaf that was folded once.

• 2

  [recipient] After almost 40 years of silence, BR’s first wife Alys (née Pearsall Smith, 1867–1951) congratulated her ex-husband out of the blue when his Order of Merit was announced in June 1949. Yet Alys had remained quietly devoted to BR since their separation was formalized in 1911, after which she took on occasional social and humanitarian work before concentrating in later years on the care of her ailing brother, Logan, who died in 1946. She was thrilled that her friendly overture to BR was reciprocated and that some contact between them resumed (see Monk 2: 319–23). One highlight of this for Alys was the 78th birthday party she put on for BR and his son’s family in May 1950. As indicated by this letter and others, which continued until Alys’s death early the following year, BR immediately slipped back into the seemingly formal but actually intimate Quaker use of “thy”, “thee” and “thine”, by which they had addressed each other as a courting and married couple.

• 3

  birthday letter Alys had celebrated her 83rd (and last) birthday on 21 July 1950; the greeting to which BR alludes here (dated 16 July), which she acknowledged in the letter of 24 July to which he was replying, is not extant.

• 4

  I am glad thy broadcast was such a success. On 8 July 1950 the BBC Third Programme had aired “A Visit to Tennyson”, Alys’s reminiscence of her encounter as a young woman with the Victorian poet laureate. In 1885 she had travelled to his country house on the Isle of Wight bearing a letter of introduction from her father’s friend Walt Whitman. Writing to BR on 21 July she had related how her “Tennyson Talk was a great success, with much approval from the 3rd Prog. Producers, & Bob G. H. [Gathorne-Hardy] wrote to me: ‘Your Broadcast was absolutely delicious, like an enchanting, exquisite, complete little short story, with a perfect twist at the end “How we must have bored him!” ’ ” (Auto. 3: 50). Although the talk was never published, Alys’s radio script is among a small collection of her papers in the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana Bloomington.

• 5

  thence to Alice Springs (in the middle) After BR expressed eagerness to see the central Australian outback, arrangements were hastily made for him to fly there with R.P. Greenish between his two Adelaide lecture dates. His short stay in Alice Springs, Northern Territory (from 5–7 August), seems to have left as lasting an impression on BR as any of his longer sojourns in Australia’s state capitals and reinforced his optimism about the possibility of mastering the challenging environmental conditions of the country’s arid interior (see Jo-Anne Grant, “Russell the Rainmaker: Touring in Early Cold War Australia”, Russell 36 [summer 2016]: 78–9). Of its rugged beauty, BR told the Adelaide News after returning to the capital of South Australia that “He had seen nothing like it anywhere in the world.... Nearest approach was California” (“Great Future for ‘Alice’ ”, 7 Aug. 1950, p. 8; App. I.23 in Papers 26).

• 6

  cutting giving part of an average day Unidentified.

• 7

  The owner … his wife Over the weekend of 29–30 July BR stayed at “Mooramong”, a large grazing property near Skipton, Victoria, owned by (Donald) Scobie Mackinnon (1906–1974), whose Canadian-born wife Claire (née Adams, 1896–1978) had, indeed, featured in a number of silent Hollywood movies in the early 1920s. Her second husband (whom she married in 1937) studied history and law for three years at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he excelled athletically (becoming Captain of Boats) before returning to Australia in 1928 without graduating. The Mackinnons attended the AIIA’s reception of welcome for BR in the National Gallery the day after he arrived in Melbourne and could have extended their invitation to him at that formal gathering (see “Bertrand Russell”, The Herald, Melbourne, 21 July 1950, p. 11). They were clearly something of a “society” couple, habitués of the Melbourne racecourse who spent as much time at their town house in nearby South Yarra as on the rural property visited by BR. No ordinary sheep station itself, Mooramong was transformed by the Mackinnons “from a staid Victorian homestead into a jazz-age folly with Art Deco cocktail bar, swimming pool, games room, and a ballroom reminiscent of a film star’s dressing room” (Virginia Maxwell, “Mackinnon, Donald John Scobie [1906–1974]”, Australian Dictionary of Biography 15 [2000]; accessed 4 April 2019).