Esmond
Romilly,
the nephew of Winston
Churchill, was
born in 1918. Educated at Wellington College he caused a stir when
he declared he was a pacifist
and with his brother, Giles Romilly, refused to join the Officer Training
Corps.
The
brothers also distributed communist leaflets in the school and began
publishing a left-wing journal, Out of Bounds:
Public Schools' Journal Against Fascism,
Militarism and Reaction. In the first issue Romilly stated
that the journal would "openly champion the forces of progress
against the forces of progress against the forces of reaction on every
front, from compulsory military training to propagandist teaching."
The journal soon had a circulation of over 3,000 copies.
In 1934 the Daily
Mail wrote
an article about the activities of the Romilly brothers under the
headline: "Red Menace in Public Schools! Moscow Attempts to Corrupt
Boys". Soon afterwards the fifteen run away from school and went
to work for a Communist bookshop in London.
He also established a centre for other boys who had run away or had
been expelled from public schools.
Romilly
was eventually arrested and after his mother had told the judge that
he was uncontrollable he was sentenced to a six-week term in a Remand
Home for delinquent boys. On his release Romilly joined forces to
publish the book Out of Bounds:
The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly
(1935). The book received good reviews and the Observer
commented on its "considerable intelligence, modesty, and
tolerance, a series of clear,
humorous, and lively pictures of schools, boys, masters and parents"
On
the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War Romilly
joined the International
Brigades. As the British
Battalion had not yet been formed Romilly and 15 other
Englishmen were attached to the German Thaelmann
Battalion. Romilly fought
in the defence of Madrid
but by December 1936 all but two of the English group had been killed
or seriously wounded. The following month, suffering from dysentery,
he was sent home.
In February 1937
Romilly returned to Spain as a journalist
with the News
Chronicle.
His girlfriend, Jessica
Mitford,
went with him
and they married in June 1937. While on honeymoon Romilly wrote Boadilla,
an account of his experiences in the Spanish
Civil War.
When Romilly returned
to England he found work as a copywriter for a small advertising agency
in London, whereas Jessica was employed
in market research. Along with his wife Romilly became involved in
the struggle against the British
Union of Fascists.
In 1939 Mitford
and Romilly went to the United States. On the
outbreak of the Second World War Romilly went
to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian
Air Force but was killed in November 1941 during a bombing raid over
Nazi Germany.
(1)
Esmond Romilly, Out of Bounds
(1934)
We
attack not only the vast machinery of propaganda which forms the basis
of Public Schools, and makes them so useful in the preservation of
a vicious and obsolete form of society; we oppose not only the semi-compulsory
nature of the Officers' Training Corps, and the hypocritical stuff
about character building - we oppose every one of the obscure restrictions,
and petty rules and regulations.
(2)
Esmond Romilly, Out of Bounds:
The Education of Giles
and Esmond Romilly (1935)
I
had a violent antipathy to Conservatism, as I saw it in my relations.
I hated militarism, as this meant the O.T.C., and I had read a good
deal of pacifist literature. Like many people, I mixed up pacifism
with Communism. While I was in
London at the beginning of the Easter holidays in 1933, before crossing
to Dieppe, a street-seller sold me a copy of the Daily Worker.
I was excited and intrigued, and gave an order to have a copy sent
each day to Dieppe while I was there. Though I did not leam much Communism,
I learned that there was another world as well as the one in which
I lived.
(3)
Esmond
Romilly, Boadilla (1937)
The
first British battalion was being trained at Albacete. It was part
of the section of a thousand Englishmen who, in February, were to
hold the most vital positions near the Valencia road under twelve
days of the biggest artillery bombardment of the war, then counterattack
and make Madrid's road safe for months - perhaps for good. I might
have gone back and joined those men, who are the real heroes of the
Spanish struggle. But I did not go. I got married and lived happily
instead.
(4)
Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977)
(In
1937) I met for the first time Esmond Romilly,
a second cousin of ours whom I had long admired from afar. Esmond
had been in the news for some years, ever since he had run away from
Wellington, his public school, at the age of fifteen to work in a
Communist bookshop where with other runaways he plotted the editing,
production and distribution of a magazine designed to foment rebellion
in all the public schools. He and his brother Giles had written a
book. Out of Bounds, describing their education and their conversion
to radicalism, which had stirred considerable controversy in the press
when it was published in 1935.
I had followed Esmond's
fortunes with deep interest in the newspapers and through family gossip;
shortly before arriving at Cousin Dorothy's I had read a dispatch
in the News Chronicle: "Esmond Romilly, eighteen-year-old nephew
of Mr Winston Churchill, is winning laurels for his gallantry under
fire while serving in the International Brigade, which is fighting
for the Spanish Government in defence of Madrid.' In a disastrous
encounter with the enemy at Boadilla, on the Madrid front, in which
scores of volunteers were killed, Esmond and one other member of his
unit had been the only survivors. Suffering from a severe case of
dysentery, Esmond had been invalided out of the International Brigade
and sent to England to recuperate, which is how he came to be staying
at Cousin Dorothy's.
That weekend, Esmond agreed
to take me with him back to Spain, where he had a commission as a
reporter for the pro-Loyalist News Chronicle. The following
Sunday we fled, having devised an elaborate stratagem to deceive my
parents into believing I was going to stay in Dieppe with some 'suitable'
girls of my age. By the time they discovered
my defection, Esmond and I were living in Bilbao, capital of the Basque
province, and were engaged to be married. In an effort to prevent
our marriage, Farve made me a Ward in Chancery and his solicitors
sent Esmond a telegram saying, 'Miss Jessica Mitford is a ward of
the court. If you marry her without leave of judge you will be liable
to imprisonment.' We took this as a declaration of total war. Eventually
the British Consul in Bilbao blackmailed us into leaving by
threatening to withhold British aid in the evacuation of Basque women
and children from the war zone unless we obeyed his instruction to
return to England. This shabby piece of bargaining brought home to
me the strength and ruthlessness of the forces ranged against us.
(5)
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
(1960)
In
many ways, this was a far from ideal honeymoon. Esmond was tormented
by practical worries, and I felt completely inadequate to help solve
them. But we got to know each other faster than would have been possible
under more normal circumstances. Esmond had an infallible nose for
the cheapest possible accommodation, and we stayed in Bayonne in a
small hotel, crowded with Basque refugee families from the northern
part of Spain. Every day we checked at the Basque Consulate for my
authorization to travel and for possible news of transportation. We
went for long walks in the town, during which Esmond told of his experiences
on the Madrid front.
Within
a few weeks of the first news of the Fascist rebellion, he had set
out for Spain on his own, without telling any of his friends, fearful
that he might be rejected and sent back because of lack of military
training. For once in his life, he regretted his refusal to join the
O.T.C. at Wellington. Knowing nothing of the organization of the International
Brigade, he had simply bicycled to Marseilles in hopes of boarding
some cargo ship bound for Spain. There he learned that young men from
all countries were already flocking to the Spanish front, and he fell
in with a miscellaneous group of volunteers - French, Germans, Italians,
Yugoslavs, Belgians, Poles - sailed with them to Valencia, and was
sent to the training camp at Albacete.
There was as yet no English
battalion, so Esmond and fifteen other Englishmen were attached to
the German Thaelmann Brigade. He was relieved to learn that most of
these were also completely lacking in military training; they came
from every conceivable walk of life - car-workers, farmers, restaurant-owners,
university students. The training at Albacete was extremely brief,
and within a few days the battalion was sent to the Madrid front.
There they were in almost
continuous action, living the muddy, bloody, confused life of footsoldiers.
A week before Christmas, in a single disastrous battle, all but two
of the English group were wiped out. Esmond and the other survivor,
ill with dysentery and battle fatigue, were sent back to England,
entrusted with the heartbreaking task of visiting the relatives of
the dead.
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