« Barsetshire | Main | Please buy "Heroines" by Jessica Ruston »
October 30, 2006
Wilfrid Blunt
Wilfrid Blunt was the chairman of the Crabbet society whose members were the most senior politicans and diplomats of the day. He urged them, as members, to do their jobs as badly as possible, because he thought the British invasion of foreign countries and everything to do with the army was humbug. Instead he desired them to write poetry, which many of them did, even though they were cabinet members and viceroys and that kind of thing. One weekend each year they gathered (it was obligatory) at his house in Sussex so he could award the annual Crabbet society poetry prize.
There is a book which features one of his dafter moments in the right hand tramline. It is called "Fox hunting in Cairo: Wilfrid Blunt's Egyptian Garden" and features both Blunt and Rennell Rodd, of whom you have never heard, but whom Mark Twain called "by far the best English poet: much better than Kipling who you all like so much" Rennell Rodd was a also a wonderful writer of prose and official papers. His grand daughter lives in Paris.
Such things one only finds in libraries
Posted by Tim Coates at October 30, 2006 6:15 PM