BR TO RUPERT CRAWSHAY-WILLIAMS, 26 JULY 1950
BRACERS 56058. ALS. McMaster. B&R Hh2020.01
Edited by A.G. Bone. Reviewed by S. Turcon

Melbourne.1
July 26, 1950

Dear Rupert2

Thank you for your letter received today. I telegraphed “Buy Penralltgoch if possible”.3 It doesn’t much matter what it costs, if I can raise the money, as I can take it out of what I pay Peter.4 I think, even if the present war does not spread, Korea has made a world war soon much more likely. The only hope I see is that Americans may be frightened by their failure.5 But I don’t expect that. So I strongly favour getting a house in Wales, and it should be got now before people are alarmed in England. Here people are much more conscious of Asia; they were alarmed when the Japs got into Papua, and have remained so.6

Tylor, of Coward,^a Chance,7 has power of attorney for me and can pay what is necessary and arrange mortgage etc.

People here treat me well, except that I am having a row with the Catholics because I said Asiatics ought to learn birth control.8 Catholics say they hope instead to teach them to live chastely in marriage!

There are two representatives of the King here, the Governor General and the U.K. High Commissioner (who counts as an Ambassador). Both are working men, both socialists, and both proud of it. One of them I knew in S. Wales in 1916,9 when he and I were on the verge of going to prison.

Love to you both. I am homesick and hate being away at this time. My views are utterly gloomy so I laugh all day.

Yrs aff
BR

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from the signed original written in BR’s hand on the recto and verso of a single leaf that was folded twice.

• 2

  [recipient] Rupert Crawshay-Williams (1908–1977) and his wife Elizabeth (see BRACERS 56060, n. 2) first met BR in North Wales in 1945. They were introduced by BR’s friend and Rupert’s relative, Amabel Williams-Ellis, wife of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, to whose Portmeirion estate the Crawshay-Williamses had moved in 1942. After working as music critic, Crawshay-Williams taught at a preparatory school located for the duration of the Second World War in Deudraeth Castle — a nineteenth century gothic manor converted by Williams-Ellis into a hotel and on whose grounds Rupert and Elizabeth lived for the rest of their lives in a cottage annex. Although he lacked formal training, Crawshay-Williams had an interest in and aptitude for philosophy and was much encouraged in this pursuit by BR, who (in 1947) broadcast a laudatory review of Rupert’s first book, The Comforts of Unreason (see Papers 11: 321–7). The two men shared much intellectual common ground and in the early 1950s were often among the philosophers and scientists attending the London meetings of the Metalogical Society each month. Crawshay-Williams published a memoir of his close but occasionally strained friendship with BR — Russell Remembered (London and New York: OUP, 1970) — and bequeathed his papers to the Russell Archives (see Carl Spadoni, “Rupert Crawshay-Williams’s Bequest”, Russell 3 [summer 1983]: 29–33).

• 3

  I telegraphed “Buy Penralltgoch if possible” I.e. BRACERS 56059.

• 4

  It doesn’t much matter what it costs … I can take it out of what I pay Peter Perhaps BR was calculating that his repurchase of the cottage (see BRACERS 56056, n. 7) would reduce the size of any lump sum payable to his estranged wife in a final settlement. No such agreement was reached until both parties signed a Deed of Covenant in May 1951 (copy in RA Rec. Acq. 1,343), but until then BR paid maintenance to Peter on non-binding terms similar to those later stipulated (see Andrew G. Bone, “Divorce, Taxes, Royalties: A Text and a Commentary on Russell’s Finances c.1950”, Russell 39 [winter 2019–20]: 172–3). The couple’s divorce was not granted by decree nisi until June 1952.

• 5

  Americans … their failure In the initial phase of the Korean War, the South Korean army and hastily deployed American troops under UN command were pushed ever further down the peninsula until a solid defensive line was established around the port of Pusan on the south-east tip. During six weeks of intense fighting beginning early in August, North Korean forces strove to breach the Pusan perimeter before their badly stretched supply lines were fatally disrupted. UN positions withstood two major offensives in this critical period of the war before the North Koreans, after taking heavy casualties, started their own rapid retreat in response to a large-scale amphibious landing of UN troops at Inchon close to the 38th parallel in the north-west.

• 6

  more conscious of Asia …. alarmed when the Japs got into Papua … remained so In March 1942 Japan established a foothold on the northern coast of Eastern New Guinea (an Australian territory) as well as invading the Dutch-controlled, western half of the island. After a seaborne assault on the important allied air base at Port Moresby to the south was ruled out by the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea early in May, Japanese troops then tried (without success) to reach this target by traversing the island’s daunting central mountain range — the site of fierce jungle fighting that continued until January 1943. The vulnerability of northern Australia to aerial attack, however, had already been exposed by raids on Darwin from Japanese aircraft carriers and bases in the former Dutch East Indies. As BR wrote publicly shortly after returning to Britain: “The fear of Asia has dominated the imagination of Australians ever since the early months of 1942, when the northern regions were evacuated owing to the imminent expectation of Japanese landings” (“Happy Australia”, The Observer, 22 Oct. 1950, p. 4; 16 in Papers 26). Concerns about a resurgence of Japanese militarism had not been expunged, but the focus of these abiding Australian anxieties was shifting to Chinese communism (see Andrew G. Bone, “‘An Isolated Outpost of Western Civilization’: Russell’s Appraisal of Mid-Century Australia”, Russell 40 [winter 2020–21]: 102–28).

• 7

  Tylor, of Coward, Chance The solicitor Louis P. Tylor had been acting for BR since his bitter divorce proceedings with Dora. After the death in 1935 of Crompton Llewellyn Davies, BR’s close friend and a partner in the prominent City firm of Coward, Chance, Tylor became more intimately involved in his famous client’s legal affairs.

• 8

  row with the Catholics … Asiatics ought to learn birth control BR had imparted an urgent message about the perils of population pressure in the first part of his Australian lecture entitled “Obstacles to World Government”. Its closing section (on fanaticism) also took aim at “Those who have theological objections to birth control [and] are willing that destitution, famine, and war shall continue till the end of time because they cannot forget one misinterpreted text in Genesis”. On all bar one of the six occasions that he gave this talk, BR presented it to semi-private audiences of AIIA members. But in Sydney the lecture was expanded into a three-part series, and it was this lengthier and more public disquisition on population and the food supply that drew the ire of the speaker’s Catholic opponents. In a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, the Rev. Dr. Leslie Humble, priest, theologian and religious broadcaster, took issue with BR’s Malthusian tendencies as well as his generally “atheistic materialism” (“Lord Russell’s Views”, 28 June 1950, p. 2). BR’s clerical enemies neglected to mention that, so far as Australia was concerned, he was wholeheartedly in favour of rapid population growth, not family limitation.

• 9

  Governor General … U.K. high Commissioner …. working men, both socialists …. One of them I knew in S. Wales in 1916 Australia’s twelfth Governor-General, William McKell (1891–1985), was the first non-British holder of that office, to which he was appointed in 1947 after six years as Labor Premier of New South Wales. McKell eventually trained for the Bar but started his working life as a boilermaker and served his union as a full-time official before embarking in 1917 on a long parliamentary career in the state legislative assembly. On 18 July BR had an audience with McKell that lasted longer than scheduled as the Governor-General, an ardent champion of rural development, treated his rapt guest to a demonstration of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, whose construction he had ceremonially launched the previous October. Britain’s High Commissioner to Australia from 1946 until 1952 was Ted Williams (1890–1963), formerly Labour M.P. for the Glamorganshire constituency of Ogmore and before that a checkweighman and miners’ agent (trade union official) in a Welsh colliery and a labour educator. Williams had presumably made BR’s acquaintance in July 1916, when the latter brought his fervent anti-war message to South Wales (see Papers 13: 420) — a hotbed of wartime labour unrest — on a lecture tour far more contentious than that undertaken in early Cold War Australia.

• a

  Coward,] Coward