Hilaire
Belloc,
the son of Louis Belloc, a French barrister, was born in St. Cloud
near Paris in 1870. His mother was Elizabeth
Rayner Parkes, the daughter of the Birmingham radical, Joseph
Parkes, and granddaughter of Joseph Priestley.
Although she was converted to Catholicism
from Unitarianism, she remained a political
radical and was a strong supporter of women's rights.
The Belloc family moved to England when Hilaire was two years old.
After being educated at the Oratory School, Birmingham
he served in the French Army. Belloc
returned to England in 1892 and became a student at Balliol
College, Oxford. He graduated with
a first class honours degree but was disappointed when he was not
offered a Fellowship. Convinced that he had been rejected because
of his Catholic religious views, he went
on a lecture tour of the United States. He also had two books of verse
published: A Bad Child's
Book of Beasts (1896) and Verses
and Sonnets (1896).
Belloc returned to England and in 1902 became a naturalized British
subject. A member of the Fabian Society,
Belloc became friends with George Bernard Shaw
and H. G. Wells who helped him obtain work
with newspapers such as the Daily News
and The Speaker. Eventually he became
literary editor of the Morning Post.
In 1906 Belloc purchased King's Land in the hamlet of Shipley, near
Horsham for £900. This included a house, five acres of land and
Slindon Mill. Belloc developed a deep love for Sussex and over the
next thirty years wrote numerous articles and several books on the
subject.
Soon after moving to Shipley, Belloc became the Liberal
candidate for South Salford
and in 1906 General Election Belloc
was elected to the House of Commons. Belloc
was disappointed by Henry Cambell-Bannerman
and his government's lack of radicalism. He was particularly upset
by the government's failure to repeal the 1902
Education Act.
Although his mother, Elizabeth
Rayner Belloc and
his sister, Marie Belloc Lowndes, were
strong supporters of women's rights, Belloc
held strong views against women's suffrage.
He wrote that: "I am opposed to women's voting as men vote. I
call it immoral, because I think the bringing of one's women, one's
mothers and sisters into the political arena, disturbs the relations
between the sexes."
Hilaire Belloc won a narrow victory at
South Salford in January 1910 but lost it in the second General
Election in December. Belloc now returned to journalism and over
the next couple of years wrote for the Pall
Mall Gazette, Glasgow Herald,
The Academy and the New
York World.
He became editor of the political weekly, The
Eye-Witness, and attacked the political establishment in
his book The Party System (1911).
With contributors such as George Bernard Shaw,
H. G. Wells, Maurice
Baring and G. K. Chesterton, The
Eye Witness sold over 100,000 copies a week. In The
Eye-Witness Belloc attempted to expose examples of political
corruption, including the sale of peerages and the involvement of
David Lloyd George in the Marconi
Scandal.
After leaving the House of Commons Belloc
moved to the right. He now totally rejected the kind of reforms advocated
by his old friends in the Fabian Society.
In his book The Servile State
(1912) he attacked welfare programmes such as social insurance and
minimum wage levels.
As well as a leading journalist and political thinker, Belloc was
also a successful novelist, Mr. Clutterbuck's
Election (1908), A Change in the
Cabinet (1909), Pongo
and the Bull (1910) and historian,
The French Revolution (1911) and
the History of England (1915).
A strong supporter of Britain's involvement in the First
World War, Belloc was recruited by Charles
Masterman, the head of the War
Propaganda Bureau (WPB), to help support
the war effort. This included writing The
Two Maps of Europe (1915) for
the WPB.
Soon after the war started, Jim
Allison, advertisement
manager of The Times, decided to
form a new periodical, Land
and Water. It appeared weekly
and dealt exclusively with the war. Belloc became the journal's military
correspondent and over the next few years made frequent trips to the
Western Front. He also received detailed
accounts of what was happening from friends in the British
Army. Land and
Water was a great success and
within a few months had a circulation of over 100,000.
Belloc had always been hostile to the German race but in wartime,
his views became extremely popular. He told the readers of Land
and Water that the war was a
clash between pagan barbarism and Christian civilization. His estimates
of German casualties were often highly inflated and he constantly
made inaccurate estimates about when the war would be over. He confided
to his friend, G. K. Chesterton, that
"it is sometimes necessary to lie damnably
in the interests of the nation."
Belloc lost many friends during the the First World
War including Basil
Blackwood, Cecil Chesterton, Edward
Horner, and Raymond Asquith. His son,
Louis Belloc, who joined the Royal Flying Corps,
was killed while bombing a German transport column in August, 1918.
After the war Belloc wrote a book propounding Roman
Catholicism, Europe and Faith
(1920). Belloc also published a series of historical biographies:
Oliver Cromwell (1927), James
II (1928), Richelieu
(1930), Wolsey (1930), Cranmer
(1931), Napoleon (1932) and Charles
II (1940). In 1942 Hilaire Belloc
suffered a stroke. He lingered for eleven years and died on 16th July,
1953.
(1) Viscount Simon wrote about
Hilaire Belloc at Oxford University in
an article for the Sunday
Times published
on 9th June 1946.
Hilaire Belloc, then a history
scholar of Balliol, was our star performer
... and I agree with Lord Birkenhead that he was 'undoubtedly a great
orator'. The full tones of his resonant deep-pitched voice might have
come from the throat of his hero, Danton. His wider range and his
imaginative outlook, together with the intensity of the feelings to
which he gave utterance,
made an unforgettable impression.
(2) Isis Magazine (19th January,
1895)
Mr. Belloc, Balliol, who
had already taken a fair share in the conversational
rhetoric of the debate, spoke as a Roman Catholic, a Frenchman and
a Democrat. He abused the aristocracy, of whom he has quite primitive
ideas, he abused the Church (of England) and he abused the preceding
speaker. He cannot help being eloquent and whatever he says must always
be listened to, for it is always interesting and well said. But it
is a pity he does not always confine himself to the question at issue.
(3) Hiliare Belloc, letter
to A. C. Tait (29th November, 1910)
My retirement from Parliament
at this moment is necessary under the
present electoral law. Without a second ballot, without proportional
representation, nothing but a very great expenditure or some particular
hold upon the locality can give a man a chance against the two official
candidates. Had I fought South Salford an official Liberal would have
been put against me, and the sum of £600 to £1000 would
have been put at his disposal, and an expenditure of £600 would
have been necessary upon my side. The official Liberal would have
received anywhere from a thousand to two thousand votes, proceeding
from convention, tradition, Non-Conformist opposition to a Catholic,
and so forth. My
quarrel would not have been that the Conservative would have
got in, for it does not matter in this election who gets in, but that
£600 on my side would have been thrown away. Moreover one must
be inside the House to see how utterly futile is any attempt at representative
action. It is all very well as advertisement, but it is without
any practical consequence whatever, and it is like trying to feed
on air to attempt to satisfy the appetite for action under such conditions.
(4) Maurice Reckitt wrote about
the publication of Hiliare Belloc's book, The Servile State
in 1912, in his autobiography, As It Happened (1941)
I cannot overstate the impact of this book upon my mind and in
this I was but symptomatic of thousands of others who had passed through
the same phases as I had. Belloc argued, with a rigorous cogency and
with forceful illustration, that the whole allegedly socialist trend,
which the Fabians were so fond of boasting that they had grafted upon
Liberalism, was leading not to a community of free and equal citizens,
not even to any true collectivism, but to the unposition upon the
masses, as the price of the reforms by which their social condition
was to be ameliorated, of a servile state.
(5) Hiliare Belloc, The
Two Maps of Europe (1915)
It is wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of disasters that
may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even vices in government
which may be repressed before they became dangerous.
(6)
Basil Blackwood, letter to Hiliare
Belloc (15th October, 1915)
Many of the German guns have a range of eight miles, shells fall so
impartially they can't be dodged, one must simply wait with resignation
what fate has in store. The most horrible scene I have witnessed was
one that followed the explosion of two shells of the largest calibre
on our billets killing 24 and wounding 20. I was on the spot and helped
to remove the shattered debris. I shall never forget the hateful sight
or the long drawn out melancholy business of digging graves and giving
the 18 bodies of the others Christian burial - nor shall I forget
the idiotic address of the military chaplain who was brought up from
the neighbouring hospital for the purpose.
I must tell you that your articles in Land and Water are enormously
appreciated here by soldiers and it occurred to me at once to suggest
to you that it might be worth your while to get the job of writing
the official history. I expect it would be a gold-mine and one of
the works which will live for ever.
(7)
Hiliare Belloc, letter to G. K. Chesterton
during the First World War (12 December, 1917)
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the
nation. It wasn't only numbers that lost us Cambrai; it was very bad
staff work on the south side. Things like thought oughtn't to happen.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
