BR writes at length in appreciation of Le Ghait's work, Pour une Stratégie Nouvelle.

BR thanks the Council of the Royal Society for congratulations on his semi-centenary as a Fellow.

Re reprinting "Philosophy and Politics".

Re a mortgage on 2 Old Palace Terrace.

BR wants permission to make the basement of 2 Old Palace Terrace suitable for caretakers.

Lorda's tragi-comedy is returned with the suggestion that it be sent to Peggy Duff.

BR asks for reports of the Free Trade Hall anti-nuclear meeting in Manchester on May 21.

Because of McKinney's letter in The Listener of May 18, BR requests an offprint of his Hibbert Journal article of April 1957.

BR does not think a World Party would be effective when voters are more concerned about the Rent Act as in the recent by-elections.

BR sends Duff a document concerning Nagasaki.

BR declines Lovejoy's invitation to Duke University.

Pancer is referred to the New Leader of April or May.

BR apparently sends Rotblat letters from the Home Secretary and the Royal Society.

BR encloses (not present) his address to the Basel Conference Against Nuclear Weapons.

BR can no longer consider buying 2 Old Palace Terrace and asks about another house on the same street.

The invitation to an H-bomb exhibition did not reach BR in time.

BR has no time to write an article on "mind", which he does not know how to define.

BR feels disinclined to write the article, due to Thruelsen's uncertainty.

BR thinks there is nothing more to be done by Britons, though he supported Steele's attempt last year.

"Group action always involves delay and agreement might be difficult."

BR has become too old for such enterprises and does not expect to return to the U.S.

BR will likely introduce Hughes' pamphlet but send the typescript anyway.

BR declines a London invitation but looks forward to his visit with the Sargents.

The treasurer is sent £1 re University settlement.

Re the agents (Penningtons) for 2 Old Palace Terrace.

BR welcomes him around June 15.

BR has no objection to Egner adding new extracts for the U.S. edition.

BR's tenancy at Millbank is expiring and asks if Tylor knows of anyone who would like an investment of 4 or £5,000 in a mortgage for him.

A letter from Jerome Wiesner is to be sent to Rotblat.

If health permits, BR and Edith will attend the Basel Congress, July 4-7. BR wants to know what is expected of him.

BR cannot attend the meeting of June 16 as he has several people coming to see him "on matters of importance". Bishop of Johannesburg.

BR agrees with Eaton about the FBI and the Committee on Un-American Activities, but he has come to believe that "attacks by non-Americans serve no useful purpose".

BR accepts the presidency of a conference but cannot journey to India.

BR and Edith will come to the Vienna Congress of Pugwash. What activities would be expected of him?

BR would recommend Ayer in his place except that he is not a Fellow of the Royal Society.

BR cannot accept Koch's suggestion as his time is completely occupied.

BR is in entire sympathy and agrees to be a sponsor.

BR declines to write a review "as I am too much occupied with nuclear warfare."

Blackwell introduces himself to Dora Russell. He is in England. The first accrual of BR's archives filled 11 cabinets and 9 trunks. Blackwell hopes to add to this. He met with Dora on the trip and met John Conrad Russell, too.

Not all the letters in this folder are entered separately.

"There are hardly any people besides myself who can give an account of that time in China, or our passage through Japan." "In particular there was a family of husband, wife and son, Japanese socialists, whom we met, who were subsequently murdered by the Japanese police." [The woman's name was Miss Ito.]

Dora thinks that the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation made a mistake when it sold the archives abroad, rather than keeping them in Britain.

"I would be immensely grateful for a copy of the proceedings of the World League for Sex Reform Congress of 1929 ... this was entirely organised by Norman Haire, the Flugels and me, and had nothing to do with Russell."

Dora recollects a discussion between J.E. Littlewood and BR in Lulworth about Jourdain in the summer of 1919. "There was an agonized discussion as to whether it would be right to tell a dying man, for his comfort, that his proof was 'right'. Both of them felt they could not, even in that extremity, depart from what they held to be mathematical truth.... Littlewood went to carry greetings and what comfort could be given from both of them."

This is a second letter written on the same day.

"Alan Wood's The Passionate Sceptic is most misleading and inaccurate where the [Beacon Hill] School and I are concerned." "Some of Russell's own statements in the Autobiography are also not true."

Re Alan Wood's book, The Passionate Sceptic:

"Wood came to dinner with Frida Laski in order to meet me, and get some information ... I said as little as possible, because I have made it a rule never to gossip about Russell or give interviews about him. But I did tell the story which has never, I think, been printed, about the part I played in helping to save Russell's life in Peking. This did not appear in Wood's book, in fact nothing favourable to me did appear in it." She is puzzled why BR allowed the publication of this book.

Re Ralph Schoenman: "My granddaughters lived in Wales with Schoenman there, and they have some strong views on the matter."

She notes that Mr. Jager's theory about her influencing BR against religion is false. "Russell always put it about that I was more revolutionary than he, because we did not agree about Russia in 1920. But at that time I did save him from simply becoming an old fashioned liberal. And Industrial Civilizaton is virtually my book." "I never became a Communist." "The one thing in politics I have cared about is to reconcile East and West. I think Russell got round to my point of view in the last period of his life." "Personally, I incline to the view that wives are people."

"Russell respected intellect—and male intellect at that—above all things, as I explain in my book. He furthered the interests of any of his pupils whose minds he thought important, such as Nicod, Wittgenstein." "Why does Constance Malleson not publish her letters, or has Russell embargoed those, too? What fun for him to prevent various people ever knowing what they said about each other to him and he about them. Almost as bad as Nixon and the White House tapes."

Dora believes that when BR and Wittgenstein met in the Hague, Wittgenstein was a homosexual. "I also believe that his admiration for Russell had a similar foundation. I am not among those who set store by Wittgenstein's philosophy, though he was, clearly, a fascinating and entertaining character when young. He seems to have got pompous later."

BR "told me quite definitely that his reason for breaking off with Constance Malleson, who, I am sure, he would have married, was that she wanted to go on with her career as an actress and did not want to start a family."

"The prospect of a child with Peter Spence also played a vital part in our separation."

"For several years I did a fortnightly article for El Sol in Madrid, and a series of articles in the Sunday Chronicle on bringing up children."

"My articles in El Sol ... began in the summer of 1926, and went on, fortnightly, for at least five years. Articles in the now defunct Sunday Chronicle began about 1932."

"My difficulty in writing about education, is that Russell altered his view so much after he left the school and the school was run mainly by me." She does not regard Beacon Hill School as "the most important thing that Russell and I did."

This is a group entry for a series of letters to and from regarding the publication of Dora Russell's book, The Tamarisk Tree, published by Elek Pemberton.

"Rowse has always been ridiculous about Bertrand Russell. He accused him of being pro German in the First War. I heard him saying the same sort of thing after the Second War at a meeting of P.E.N. Club, when Dame Rebecca West was in the chair. I got up and attacked him then."

Re Edna Lenoir: "As to what she says about atheist books and Montreal—I am astounded. I say with—who was it?—when they banned a nude statue 'O God, O Montreal!' It is a famous saying to which Bertrand often referred."

"Russell never talked with me about Spinoza except to describe him as one of his spiritual ancestors. He had a portrait of him always on the wall in his study, with his temporal ancestors. He did not visit Spinoza's house at the Hague. It was bitterly cold when we were there; I was the only person who went out of the hotel at all, to visit the library."

Dora refutes many of the rumours about Beacon Hill School.

This letter was written after Edith Russell visited McMaster University. She thanks Blackwell for his work on BR's archives.

This is one letter in a file folder containing letters from 1970 to 1977. Most of the letters are not entered individually.

"I don't remember anything about the book you speak of about the philosophy of religion.... As to the Autobiography of 1912, I imagine that it was incorporated in the later version and the earlier draft destroyed. There were innumerable versions and stages of Autobiog. throughout the years."

"I much like Harold White's photo of Bertie standing before the bookshelves at Richmond smoking his pipe. And I like the one that ? Arya took, which Unwin has used for the cover of the U-book Outline of Philosophy. And I like the photos that that Turk [Ara Guler] and his wife took. I don't like those taken by Snowden."

"I trust you are not publishing McLendon's article. I remember his visits here, and I think to Richmond too. He was a nice and worthy man, but his mental processes and his sensitiveness seemed very laborious—at least that's what I and I believe my husband, thought at the time—and, though I can't now remember the details of his article, I remember being shocked when I read it by its obtuseness." [The article was published in Russell n.s. 34 (2014): 5-34 (https://escarpmentpress.org/russelljournal/article/view/2259/2284).]

Edith writes about the embargo and about photographs taken of BR in Australia. [Does she refer to the book inscribed by Greenish with 5 photos inserted in it?]

Edith writes about Colette: "Before your letter arrived I had not had the perfectly horrifying news that she had lain helpless for four days before being found. It is quite dreadful. It seems extraordinary that it should happen to her twice. After her stroke of some years ago she lay undiscovered and helpless in Ponders Cottage for two days."

"Lucy Donnelly had a great collection of letters from Alys Russell. They exchanged long letters with increasing frequency from the last years of the last century till Lucy's death, most of which were preserved. And I had a fairly large collection, especially from the late 1940s. But when I left the U.S.A. in 1950, I think I destroyed the lot, certainly most of it. How I regret, now, that I did not keep them."

[However, Edith hand-copied many of the letters, and they arrived in 2013, Rec. Acq. 1685.]

"I deserve censure, not congratulation, in the way that I preserved material! I allowed the great mass of letters that came following the broadcast of 'Man's Peril' and then 'The Scientists' Manifesto' and later, 'Our Imprisonment' to be destroyed! (How I regret it!) and that is to mention only a few of the holocausts."

"No, I no longer possess the 'little oak table made out of the Doomsday oak at Alderley'. I gave it and the larger one to Conrad as they seemed to me to be 'family possessions'."

"But the question as to whether Bertie was 'genuine' made me laugh aloud. I should think that to write his personal letters with an 'eye on posterity' was the last thing that it ever occurred to him to do."

Edith writes "about how Bryn Mawr College happened to have the ms. of John Forstice. My husband gave it to Lucy Donnelly who gave it to me. I gave it to the College along with most of my books and then asked for it back in order to return it to my husband. He had almost forgot its existence."

"Thank you, too, for your suggestions about Clark's book. But I fear that its margins are not wide enough for all that I should wish to say." She notes that her correspondence with BR would not have helped Clark that much. There is not much correspondence as she and BR were almost always together.

[Edith's comments on Clark's Life of Bertrand Russell were published in Russell: https://escarpmentpress.org/russelljournal/article/view/2157, https://escarpmentpress.org/russelljournal/article/view/2178, and https://escarpmentpress.org/russelljournal/article/view/2190.]

"It is difficult to realize that Lucy's death and the appalling manner of it has happened. The reasons for its happening as it did, no one seems to know."

"Colette's death saddened me and, as you and Professor Slater will, I shall miss her letters very greatly."

"The tone of The Sunday Times serialization was, certainly, disgusting. Clark himself, of course, might have done something about it, but there was nothing whatever that we could do. As to what 'Colette would have thought of all this'—I think that she would have loathed Clark's book and Dora's [?] as seen in the press." Clark was "just plain wrong" and thus "I am forced to look upon all his unearthed facts as dubious." Edith agrees that "the correspondence with Ottoline ranks among the best ever."

"Bertie's estate is suffering the final throes of settlement."

"P. Spence, by the way, has already given all her papers to the Bodleian along with a letter to say what is to be done with them when she dies. At least, so Conrad has told me."

"I knew Mary Berenson and Karin and her daughter Judith. Ann, her other girl, I only met long ago when she was a child. Is Dr Synge Ann's or Judith's daughter? If the latter, perhaps she is the baby whom Judith once brought to spend an afternoon with us in Richmond!"

Edith writes about her attempts to copy for the Russell Archives a recording "of the speech that BR made to the Great Jewish Congress that met in London in 1953." "As you remembered, it is a very moving address. The Jewish audience found it so, I was told. I wasn't at the meeting, but I remember BR's return from it and how moved he was and how impressive he had found the meeting. I don't remember ever seeing a written copy of the speech."

Edith did visit various "Whitall women" at Fernhurst.

"The Crawshay's death shocked—in the sense of surprised—us all. Most of us knew that it was the way they had intended to die, but somehow we hadn't realized that it was imminent."

Edith thinks that Susan Russell (John's ex-wife) wrote "The Lasting Impressions of Bertie Russell". "She was a poet and Bertie did try to encourage her and was fond of her as she says. The piece seems to me a brilliant and sensitive and astonishingly penetrating analysis, almost wholly intuition, not reasoned at all." Michael Burn also thinks she wrote it. There are only two points that they don't agree with. "I do not think that she knows much about Islam. But I think what she says of Bertie himself on page 7 is both perceptive and accurate." "In spite of the fact that it is well-written, as the author says, and so slap-dash, it seems to me [and to Burn] one of the best short descriptions and characterizations that I know of Bertie. What a pity that Clark has none of Susan's sensitiveness or understanding."

Bertie was well aware of the "elements warring within him" but he "could not manage to bring them together in peace. We used to talk about it. A few years later, in the latter half of the fifties, he felt that at last he had succeeded and was at peace and happy." "'Diddy' was Conrad's pronunciation of 'daddy'. It was adopted by all the family and by many of their friends."

"Norah Purcell, an ex-wife of Victor Purcell, was Bertie's secretary in 1950-51."

"Is it possible to prepare out of my father's minor articles a general statement of his view on the scope of civil disobedience?" This letter is contained in a file of correspondence between Blackwell and Conrad Russell; not all the letters are entered individually.

Re the dissertation of Jo Newberry (later Vellacott):

"I am extremely impressed with what I have read so far, and find her work outdoes Ronald Jager's as the most sensitive and perceptive portrayal of my father I have read. I am constantly finding passages which make me understand both him and myself as his son better than I did before."

Re Ronald Clark biography:

"I think he has tried hard to get at the truth, but his work has been sensationalized by those who lack time to digest it."

"I would say my father's standard of classical knowledge was about that achieved by a lower second B.A. in Classics today."

"I remember my father introducing me to the joys of exploring the tube in 1944-5, and I think, got a fair picture of what it meant to him.... He would never willingly have missed the opportunity to see the night sky from a town, and one might add that though he preferred the tube to buses, he equally firmly preferred taxis to tube (he had greater skill in getting a taxi in London than anyone else I have ever met.) My father's attitude to the tube was much the same as Mr. Gladstone's: it was a fascinating new mechanical toy. I think he knew the exact depth of every central London station. The mystery of the engineering was added to a delight in train which, with my elder son, has now shown up in all four generations of the family who have grown up since railways began." "I believe my father's central bald patch dated from very early: it certainly dated from before my first memories."

This letter is signed "Peg Adam". Her second married name is "Aitchison".

"I was his private secretary, and possibly is closest confidante from 1930-33...."

Re the second volume of the Autobiography: "All but I think the last chapter of this was written with me." "I was astonished at the cursory way in which this part of his life was treated, and at the many omissions."

This letter contains an excerpt from a letter from BR, see record 121785.

This extract appears in a letter from Adam to Blackwell, 1969/03/04, record 121784. She is in the Canary Islands and her letters from BR are in England, thus she is working from memory.

"In the last letter I had from Bertie, handwritten very shakily, he mentioned the wish to see me, saying 'have (sic) the world wants to shoot me, and the other half wants to deify me. I hope I see you before the first half gets its way."

The date is taken from her letter to Blackwell, 10 May 1969, in which she says a copy is enclosed (it wasn't).

Adam lists all the Russell materials in her possession and her memories of what she used to have from the period 1930-33 when she worked for him, which were lost in the war. She indicates she is enclosing a letter but it is not there. See record 121785. She notes that she did not see him between 1933 and 1950 when they met again in Australia. She does not think Education and the Social Order was written in the summer of 1932 at Carn Voel but earlier at Bernard Street. That is where he acquired and did the original sorting with her of the Amberley papers. She married in Jan. 1932 and visited BR and Peter at Emperor's Gate.

"My own impression is that he wrote The Scientific Outlook, Education and the Social Order and the Autobiography up to 1921 in that order." "I did not become his secretary until, I think, late November of 1930."

Adam did not meet Peter "until 1931 when, under Bertrand's tutelage, I became very much involved with her for a time."

These letters concern Adler's debate with BR at the Sinai Temple Forum, 20 Jan. 1941.

These letters concern Robert Sencourt, BR and Vivienne Eliot.

This is a group entry for letters between Blackwell and Chao.

"No".

BR has no time that is not booked during his next trip to London and cannot meet the Narayans.

BR is not persona grata with the Home Office.

The Childs bank statement is to be sent to BR's accountant.

The letters mainly concern the sale of the 12th Duke of Bedford's papers to McMaster.

BR encloses (not present) his preface to Labour and the H-bomb".

Armstrong writes that he cannot locate any letters that BR wrote to him during World War I. There are other letters in the file; Armstrong has nothing to send to the Russell Archives, and his memories of Catherine Marshall are vague.

BR presumably returns something to the College Office that was "wrongly forwarded".

BR keeps only serious press cuttings and "those informing me that I shall spend eternity in hell". He and Edith will see Priestley in Basel.

BR cannot attend Schmidt's meeting on the world situation.

Arnoni writes about the memorandum on Ralph Schoenman:

"I must say that Russell's recount of what had happened was very much of a cosmetics job. So do I also feel about the 'Memorandum' generally. I have many reservations about it, including about its candor and certain factual allegations. Much as I believe Schoenman to have been a liability to Russell, I even have evidence that contradicts at least some of Russell's disclaimers of responsibility, retroactive belittling of the role he had allowed Schoenman to play, his awareness of certain of Schoenman's methods, etc."

There are other letters in the file; they are not entered separately.

BR sends his accountant a document from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

BR cannot attend a meeting in South Wales in the autumn.