Lot 1284 , Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965), poet, critic and publisher, Criterion, 24 Russell Square, London WC1; letter to Peter Winckworth ‘Dear Winckworth’, 30 Buckingham Gate. London SW1, 21 October 1937

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965), poet, critic and publisher, Criterion, 24 Russell Square, London WC1; letter to Peter Winckworth ‘Dear Winckworth’, 30 Buckingham Gate. London SW1, 21 October 1937 Unable to lunch next week as he will be in Edinburgh the whole week; very glad to lunch later; ‘the only day in every week on which I am never free is Wednesday’; ‘I shall be interested to know if you really have some good Wensleydale at Windham’s; if so, I must speak severely to our steward, who has not provided any Wensleydale at all yet this year’.

In 1922 Eliot jumped at an offer from Lady Rothermere, wife of Esmond Harmsworth, second Viscount Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail, to edit a high-profile literary journal. The first number of The Criterion appeared in October 1922. Like The Waste Land, which The Criterion first published, it took the whole of European culture in its sights. The Criterion's editorial voice placed Eliot at the centre of first the London and then the continental literary scene. The editorial life on Russell Square was also conducted over friendly dinners that served the function of a college or a club, and Eliot seemed to thrive on such occasions.
At about the same time Eliot reached out for religious support, and turned to the Church of England. Few followers were prepared for Eliot's baptism into the Church of England on 29 June 1927 at Finstock in Oxfordshire, and so, within five years of his avant-garde success, Eliot provoked a second storm. The furore grew in November 1927 when Eliot took British citizenship and again in 1928 when he collected a group of politically conservative essays under the title For Lancelot Andrewes and prefaced them with a declaration that he considered himself ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’. (ODNB)
Eliot had been introduced to Winckworth in April 1932 by (Archibald) Kenneth Ingram (1882-1965), author and vice-chairman of the National Peace Council, who was ‘anxious [for Eliot] to meet a young friend of mine … [who] has an unusually good mind and writes very fair verse. I am sure you would like him’. Ingram, an Anglo-Catholic lay theologian, socialist, and prolific writer, attempted in several works to integrate his sexuality with his religious beliefs. See David Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’; Victorian Studies 25 (2) (1982) 181-210. Winckworth was one of the originators of the Seven Years’ Association, established at the 1933 Anglo-Catholic Congress to form ‘a youth auxiliary to the Church Union’. In July 1934 he sent Eliot a ‘short essay’ on the Association, which he hoped he might arrange to review in the St Stephen’s parish magazine. He hoped too that Eliot might take the chair at their meeting in Kensington on 16 October, which he duly did. In December 1934, Eliot described Winckworth to William Kemp Lowther Clarke, a Church of England clergyman, as ‘a very good man indeed, and I have great hopes of him’.
The present letter is a reply to Winckworth’s invitation to Eliot to participate in a Junior Church Congress on the theme of the Christian Revolution, to be held at the Dorland Hall in Regent Street 28-20 April 1938. His letter declining the invitation expressed a need to conserve his energy, and that ‘Dorland Hall is rather too public a place to suit my book’. His reluctance to appear was doubtless influenced by an incident at the Dorland Hall in November 1935, when he had been accosted by his estranged wife Vivien in one of her ‘often histrionic attempts to embarrass him into a reconciliation’ (https://tseliot.com ; ODNB).

John Peter Winckworth was born on 2 November 1908, youngest of the three children of Lewis Herbert Winckworth (1864-1940), solicitor, and Ruthella Theodora, elder daughter of the Revd Herbert Clementi-Smith of Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, chaplain to the Mercers’ Company. In September 1922 he entered Grants House at Westminster School (also attended by his father and three uncles) and left in July 1927.
Admitted as a solicitor in October 1932, he practised in London, in 1947 with Messrs Trollope and Winckworth of 21 Old Queen Street, Westminster. Winckworth was one of the originators of the Seven Years’ Association, established at the 1933 Anglo-Catholic Congress to form ‘a youth auxiliary to the Church Union’. In 1948 he became Registrar of the Diocese of Oxford, and subsequently served as a Church Commissioner, Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers 1961-2, a governor of St Paul’s School and Secretary of the Church Union.
He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in August 1940, and was transferred to the Training Progress Section of the Air Ministry in 1941.
Winckworth was author of Does Religion Cause War? (1934); Sensible Christians (1935); The Way of War: Verses (1939); A Simple Approach to Canon Law (1951); The Seal of the Confessional and the Law of Evidence (1952); A Verification of the Faculty Jurisdiction (1953); and A History of the Gresham Lectures (1966).
He died at Eastbourne on 28 April 1986, and a requiem mass was held at St Matthew’s Church Westminster on 23 June.
His portrait, by Richard Aylmer Frost (1905-1995), a Westminster contemporary, 1924, is among the collections of the school (GB 2014 WS-03-PIC-002/29): https://collections.westminster.org.uk/index.php/gb-2014-ws-03-pic-002-29

The Windham Club, established (as the Windham House Club) in 1828 as a ‘place of meeting for a Society of Gentlemen all connected with each other by a common bond of literary or personal acquaintance’, migrated to No. 13 St James’s Square in 1836. In 1945 it amalgamated with the Marlborough and Orleans Clubs, to form the Marlborough-Windham Club. (Survey of London 28 and 29, St James Westminster, pp136-139.)
£700-900

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