BOOKS
Clever Hearts
Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, a Biography (Victor Gollancz, 1990)
This was the first biography Hugh and I wrote together; it was based on original, unpublished letters and diaries of his grandparents, Desmond MacCarthy (1877- 1952) and Mary, known as Molly, his wife (1882 – 1953).
Desmond was the pre-eminent literary critic of his day; Molly, also a good writer ,coined the term the “Bloomsberries” which has become a catchphrase, to describe their friends living in Bloomsbury, London, among them Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell.
We were greatly helped by being able to talk to Frances Partridge, the legendary chronicler of that period; to Professor Quentin Bell, son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and his wife, Anne Olivier Bell,who edited Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries; and also to Desmond and Molly’s children, Rachel, Hugh’s mother, and Dermod, his uncle. Conversations with them were invaluable as we tried to capture the flavour of the period we were writing about –the first half of the 20th century ,and its literary life.
Clever Hearts won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the first Marsh Biography Award in the year of its publication, 1990
The Flower of Battle,
How Britain Wrote the Great War
(Secker & Warburg, 1995, Steerforth Press, U.S.A., 1996)
In this widely researched study of the literature of the Great War,1914 -1918, Hugh tells the stories of twelve writers, popular in their day, and how they “found words for the war in novels,plays,poems and stories...these writers are all very different ...Some of them ,at the time,enjoyed massive sales, because they briefly caught a public mood”. The best known are Herbert Read and Richard Aldington; the others, such as Pamela Hinkson, Oliver Onions, and V.M. Yeates are largely forgotten.
For Hugh’s doctoral thesis on his great-uncle Lord Robert Cecil and the founding of the League of Nations, he had studied the economic,political and social after-effects of the Great War now he was examining post-war culture, literature in particular.
Feeling “it is the duty of the historian to discover as well as to interpret”, Hugh was indefatigable in tracking down the lives of his chosen authors all over the world, and talking to their surviving relations,young and extremely old, “looking through much unfashionable prose, in a search for a picture of the past”, in the belief that their personal histories which he “retrieved in the nick of time, further our understanding of the war they knew,the society they inhabited ,and of modern war experience”.
Hugh wrote The Flower of Battle in part “to establish a link with that Great War generation, which is now about to vanish altogether . . . I simply wanted to cross, before it is too late, the ever-widening divide that separated me from the authors of the novels I had read, and the war of which they wrote...to bring back an earlier generation, to halt the process of time.”
The Flower of Battle was widely praised: as one reviewer observed it was - “clearly a labour of love, written with understanding and unobtrusive authority”.
Facing Armageddon,
The First World War Experienced
(Leo Cooper,1996,Pen & Sword publishing, 2003)
Facing Armageddon, was a compilation of essays written by contributors from all over the world, edited by Hugh and his friend and colleague, Peter Liddle.
Hugh would also write an introduction to a harrowing First World War novel Retreat, a Story of 1918 by Charles R. Benstead,first published in 1930, (re-published 2008, University of South Carolina Press)
Imperial Marriage,
An Edwardian War and Peace
(John Murray, 2002)
Hugh and I wrote about the intertwined lives of Lord Edward Cecil (1867-1918), soldier son of the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, the Victorian statesman, and of Violet Maxse (1872-1953), Edward’s wife, and of Violet’s great love, her second husband, Alfred, Viscount Milner (1854-1925).
We followed Edward Cecil’s adventures in South Africa, during the Boer War, travelling to Mafeking,where he was besieged, and staying, in Cape Town, where Violet remained behind, and where she fell in love with Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner.
More harrowing was the fate of Edward and Violet’s only son, George, who was killed aged 18, at the beginning of the Great War, during his first engagement with the enemy, in September 1914. We visited his grave, at Villers-Cotteret in Northern France, an idyllic woodland setting, which Violet also visited a century earlier in her desperate search for clues about the death of her beloved son.
Once again, Hugh and I were fortunate in being able to use hitherto unpublished family papers, in the wonderful archive at Hatfield House, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as well as the little Mafeking Museum.
In Search of Rex Whistler,
His Life and His Work
(Frances Lincoln, 2012)
The romantic artist Rex Whistler (1905-1944) was often overlooked by comparison with contemporaries such as Eric Ravilious, and the ubiquitous Cecil Beaton. In writing his biography, it was a delight to discover treasures such as his portraits in oils, many in private collections, and his copious illustrated letters.
Rex Whistler’s reputation, and his archive, had been closely guarded by his brother, Laurence Whistler, the outstanding glass engraver: both Laurence and Rex had been close friends of Hugh’s parents, and Hugh became close to Laurence, especially after his parents’ death, and he was friendly, too ,with Laurence’s children, which made our research the more enjoyable.
Rex Whistler’s archive is held in Salisbury Museum, and here and in other collections we could unfold his friendships with the remarkable writer and diarist Edith Olivier, for example, and the languid aesthete Stephen Tennant.
At the time of the publication of our lavishly illustrated biography in the autumn of 2012, Colefax and Fowler, the renowned firm of interior decorators, mounted an exhibition of Whistler’s works in their elegant Mayfair premises: we were lent wonderful treasures by generous owners, and the exhibition was extended for several weeks.
We hope that our writing has helped to re-establish Whistler’s position amongst the finest artists of the first half of the 20th Century in Britain. One reviewer said our biography “throws new light on the artist’s complex world and marks the resounding reclamation of his reputation”.
Rex Whistler's Wessex Landscapes, Friendships, War
Pamphlet by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil 2013
Rex Whistler - Inspiration
by Hugh Cecil And Mirabel Cecil
We followed the big biography with other related work:
Rex Whistler : Inspirations (the Pimpernel Press, 2015) is a boxed set of two volumes, Love and War, and Family, Friendships, Landscapes.
Perhaps the modest publication of which Hugh and I were most proud is the facsimile edition, An Anthology of Mine (Pimpernel Press, 2015).
This beautifully produced facsimile is of the ‘little anthology’ of his favourite poems which Rex Whistler wrote out and illustrated in a simple lined exercise book in 1923, aged 18. A highly romantic collection, it gives us an insight into the sensibility of the youthful artist.
Words by Mirabel Cecil