H. J. Massingham

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H. J. Massingham, by Elliott & Fry, 1948

Harold John Massingham (25 March 1888 – 22 August 1952)

ruralism
, matters to do with the countryside and agriculture. He was also a published poet.

Life

Massingham was the son of the journalist

Athenaeum, and the Nation,[3] and knew D. H. Lawrence.[4] In the 1920s he became a research assistant for two anthropologists from University College, London, and an interest in archeology and anthropology, which proved lifelong, led to the publication of Downland Man (1926) and a number of other works. He worked on a research project whose aim was to show that all megalithic culture in England had spread from Egypt.[5]

By 1932 Massingham began to write more and more on country life, and the first of a long series of such books, possibly his best-known, was Wold Without End (1932), reflecting his experiences living in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. A serious accident happened in 1937, when he injured his leg, leading to a two-year period of regular hospital visits, at the end of which he hurt the same leg again, and it had to be amputated. He was forced to stop travelling as frequently as he had been doing and settled down to writing some thirty more books.[5]

He was strongly influenced by the writings of Gilbert White and edited selections of White's writings. [6] He was one of a group of

distributist
ideas current at the time, as in his 1943 The Tree of Life.

He was one of the twelve members of the

Kinship in Husbandry, set up in 1941 by Rolf Gardiner, a society dedicated to countryside revival in a post-war world. According to academics Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, Massingham was uncomfortable with what he felt was a pro-German tendency in this group. When the Kinship later merged with two other bodies to form the Soil Association, Massingham with Gardiner, the landowner Lord Portsmouth
and the agricultural journalist Lawrence Easterbrook came onto the Soil Association's Council.

After Massingham's death his collection of tools, implements and products of craftsmanship and husbandry were donated to the Museum of English Rural Life.[7] Many of the objects appear in his book "Country Relics".[8]

Works

Published posthumously
  • Prophesy of Famine: a Warning and the Remedy (1953), with Edward Hyams
  • The Essential Gilbert White of Selborne (1983), editor, selected by Mark Daniel
  • Fifteen Poems (Hayloft Press, 1987)
  • A Mirror of England: an anthology of the Writings of H. J. Massingham (1882–1952), edited by Edward Abelson (1988)

References

  1. ^ "Search Results for Massingham, (Harold) John (1888–1952), rural writer". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 2 February 2021.
  2. ^ "H J Massingham Collection". The National Archives. 18 December 2008. Retrieved 2 February 2021.
  3. ^ "Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary". TheFreeDictionary.com.
  4. ISBN 978-0-521-25420-5
    .
  5. ^ a b c Musty, John (1985). "Collecting Country Writers: H. J. Massingham and W. Beach Thomas". Antiquarian Book Monthly Review. 12 (3): 94–101.
  6. ^ David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction, Routledge, 1996 (p. 170).
  7. ^ "Massingham Collection". The Museum of English Rural Life. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  8. ^ Massingham, H.J. Country Relics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1939
  9. ^ Detail from a copy of book which is published by Ivor Nicholson and Watson London in 1832, and reprinted in the same year
  10. ^ Detail from a book published by Cobden-Sanderson London in 1934
  11. ^ Detail taken from a copy of the book first published in 1945 by J. M. Dent London
  12. ^ Detail from a book published by Collins London in 1950

Further reading

External links

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