Wartime Contributors

Since most of the able-bodied young were directly involved in war-work, Murray was to some extent tied to the personnel he and his predecessor had built up earlier. Edmund Blunden, for example, not only wrote for the paper often during the Second World War but was brought on to its staff. Other well-established literary and academic figures who continued to appear included Laurence Binyon, Ifor Evans, Roger Fry, Roger Fulford, Philip Guedalla, John Hayward, Christopher Hollis, Lewis Namier, Mario Praz, Peter Quennell, Herbert Read and Michael Sadleir. The youngest of these had been boys during the First World War and were now in their mid to late thirties. The others could remember the reign of Queen Victoria.

None the less, there are more than 250 newcomers to the index of contributors in these years: a rate of growth comparable to that earlier in numbers, if not in volume of work. They include the economist Friedrich von Hayek, the political scientist Harold Laski, the physicist Edward Appleton, the Chinese author Hsiao Ch’ien, the art historians Tancred Borenius, Joan Evans and Nikolaus Pevsner, the natural historian H. J. Massingham, the journalist Tom Driberg, a number of novelists, among them Richard Church and Richard Hughes, and other literary people: Geoffrey Faber, M. H. Abrams, Phyllis Hartnoll. George Bernard Shaw, hitherto not a TLS reviewer though he had contributed frequent letters, wrote his first review for the paper in 1945, on a book about the Webbs.

The social and professional profile was changing. In general, new contributors were more middle-class (fewer than 1% from the aristocracy and baronetcy, as compared with 5% earlier), less bureaucratic (civil servants, in these administratively hectic times, accounted for 9% of new reviewers rather than the earlier 16%), slightly less academic (23% against 29%), more cosmopolitan, more worldly (there was an increase in reviewers working in business and commerce), more literary – largely as a result of the inclusion of new writing – and more journalistic, with a notable increase in people whose jobs were on papers other than The Times. There is also a striking rise in the proportion of specialists commissioned to write just one item.

A small but significant percentage of those enlisted to help "man the strongholds of the mind" were women: 11% of new reviewers during the war, compared with 7% in the paper’s first two decades (but 13% in the 1920s and 30s). Some of them, including Naomi Royde-Smith, Elizabeth Sturch, Marjorie Hessell Tiltman and the editor’s wife Leonora Murray, wrote pieces almost every week. Of course, as the poet and novelist Gertrude Woodthorpe pointed out in a TLS review in 1940, it was not the Second World War but the First which had secured most of the emancipations women then enjoyed. For many, 1939 brought an interruption to established careers which should have earned them a larger and more fully recognised role at the TLS, as elsewhere. There was a marked degree of gender-stereotyping in how reviewer was matched to subject: children’s books and books about clothes, for example, were invariably reviewed by women. On the other hand, almost every work on the pressing topic of the British colonies and their future was reviewed by Margery Perham, Reader in Colonial Administration at Oxford. Even the TLS’s main wartime reviewer of books on the sea and sailing was a woman. A good proportion of the poems were by women, among them "H.D.", as well as Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell. Other well-known female contributors included Georgina Battiscombe, Clemence Dane, and Elizabeth Middleton Murry. Most tellingly, the paper’s first major statement on the role of writers in the Second World War was not only written by a woman but appeared under her name: Storm Jameson.

The piece appeared on 7 October 1939 with the heading "Fighting the Foes of Civilization. The Writer’s Place in the Defence Line." Jameson wrote fervently about how the "forces of regress" – anti-Semitism among them – had persisted throughout the supposedly civilized world since the First World War, and warned of how easily a new conflict might produce other regressions, particularly in the form of censorship. For her as for many writers of the time, one prediction about the war was that in combating Fascism, the Allies would find themselves taking on some of its colouring. Authors could be useful, here: "The writer, because he is used to breaking through his own solitude in order to speak, is more able than other men to reach the individual in time to save him from choking in the officially induced fog." It was essential, Jameson insisted, to avoid the crudifications of jingoism – of a sort which she criticized in The Times itself. "A correspondent in The Times wrote lately, ‘We have no other aim than to destroy Hitlerism, and no elaboration of that simple purpose should be permitted.’ The writer cannot allow himself to share this comforting simplicity." Literature’s task, she continued, was nothing less than that of "imagining for Europe a future from which the poison of nationalism has been drawn....The rest is to experience despair as a stage in courage...the thought of defeat as a reminder that no Dark Age has outlasted, or can outlast, the unquenchable energy of the mind."

Jameson, then in her late 40s, was among the most prominent British novelists and cultural activists of her day. A lifelong socialist, she had begun her career as a writer in 1913 with a piece about Shaw for A. R. Orage’s journal New Age, where she became a regular contributor. By the 1920s she was in effect the editor of a shorter-lived little magazine, New Commonwealth. An early, vocal and consistent opponent of Fascism (she and her husband, the publisher Guy Chapman, were among those who went to see at first hand what was happening in Germany in the early 1930s), she helped organize practical support for refugees and in 1938 was elected as the first woman president of PEN, a position which she held until the end of the war.

Jameson was a close friend of D. L. Murray, whom she later described as "like a good-humoured priest, large, soft, delicate in mind and manner, with no vanity and not a great deal of male energy." It’s not clear what kind of male energy she may have wanted from him but intellectually, at any rate, she seems to have supplied some of what was missing herself. Certainly the ideas expressed in her article at this early stage of the war, though (as she admitted) not entirely original, were to become theme-tunes of the TLS in the coming months and years. Arthur Crook recalls that Murray admired Jameson’s novels enormously, "and also her general attitude and thoughts about the war. She was quite an important part of the Supplement. They dined together frequently and he took a lot of guidance from her." So much so that in 1944, as she later described, Murray "set me down to write his editorial" on the liberation of Paris, which took place while she was staying with him, his wife and his father at their home in Brighton, convalescing from an illness.

According to Jameson, Murray was "deeply proud" of his editorship of the TLS and mortified by what she describes as his "abrupt dismissal" in 1945. His successor, Stanley Morison, claimed that Murray – in whose appointment he had been involved – had fatally "lightened" the paper, and Morison liked to boast that when he took over, he made it "difficult to read again". But Murray was right to feel that he had done a good job: one which he carried out in exceptionally difficult circumstances, and with little recognition. Most historians of modern British literature still write as if the only wartime British literary journals were Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and John Lehmann’s New Writing. D.L.Murray’s TLS deserves a place in the story.

Murray had spent a quarter of a century on the staff. Another epochal event for the paper at this time was the death of Harold Child in November 1945, at the age of 76. Child had reviewed 3,062 books over 2,268 issues, the first of them in May 1902. But great institutions are more than the sum of their members and in the post-war years the TLS was to enter another ambitious new phase.