Brixton Letter 41
BR to Frank Russell
July 15, 1918
- ALS
- McMaster
- Edited by
Kenneth Blackwell
Andrew G. Bone
Nicholas Griffin
Sheila Turcon
Cite The Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell, https://russell-letters.mcmaster.ca/brixton-letter-41
BRACERS 46926
<Brixton Prison>1
Jy. 15, 1918.
Dear F.
Your letter came early,2 but it was sadly short, owing to Miss King.3 Lippincott.4 If you have looked through the large cabinet and the drawers of the desk, I have nowhere to suggest. Probably his agent in London would give you a copy of the contract. But it is quite unnecessary to have it. Stanley Unwin can go on just as well without it: he only has to write to Lippincott to ask if he is open to an offer, and to the Century Co. to ask if they will make one to Lippincott direct. I am assuming all this does not affect the English publication, which is what I care for, and which I hope is to be in Oct. at latest.5 Please let me know about this. Spectator.6 You could get it from Spectator office if at all — that is best way — if not there, give it up. Novels. I beseech you bring me some novels on Wed. They are vital to my happiness! If you can’t think of anything else, bring Beresford’s God’s Counterpoint7 (Collins, 6s). But I should like several novels. Pirrie. Much interested. I agree with him, not the Canadian.8 I hope you will find time for my affairs this week. I begin to fret more. I have not got on with work — wet weather gives me headache, and one can do nothing here to alleviate it. Can’t something be done to the Duke of Rutland? Since he started praying for rain9 it has rained continuously, and unless he can be stopped there will be another Flood. Can’t he be induced to pray for something really useful (Peace, say), since evidently he has the Ear of the Authorities. I grow increasingly to want tobacco. Could you bring or send some chocolate (not as a present), as cheap as you like? It takes the place of tobacco to some extent. Dear me, dear me, what a peevish letter! Forgive me, it is the rain and lack of novels. Visits. Am keen on Mrs Hamilton coming, best next time Ly. O. comes, instead of Nevinson10 ora M. Burdett. Have M. Burdett some time — but that is mere duty. Should like Macdonald some time; Nevinson some time; Mrs Huth Jackson, 64 Rutland Gateb if she would like to come: Please thank her warmly for splendid carnations. [You knew her: she was Tiny Grant Duff at Twickenham.]11
To Miss Wrinch. Given any ω-limit it is always easy in fact to assign an ω12 which it limits. But no rule can be given. Assuming ω1 is not an ω-limit, it can I think be proved that any assigned rule will break down sooner or later. This method is therefore hopeless.13 Hope to send shortly notes on symbolism and behaviourism14 to be discussed — quite inconclusive.
[Advise you to cut off above with scissors or you may get it wrong.] Please thank Miss Rinder for her message and say I should like one or two Voltaire books15 from London Library — if she will keep the list, I will work through them gradually. [No hurry, as a lot of Mirabeau books16 have just come.]c I saw Wildon Carr Friday and much enjoyed his visit this time. I hear St. George blasphemed against mathematics.17 I found an extract about another Pitt18 (less remarkable than St. G, in St. G.’s opinion) and mathematics:d “Mr. Pitt with his wonderful Quickness of Apprehension, with his strong Understanding, with all his Literature, and his honest upright Heart, would not have made the figure he does had he not applied himself to Mathematics with the greatest Assiduity” (Lady Stafford to her son, Dec. 1789). Tell this to Miss Wrinch — it will comfort her. — I am glad to be going to see Arthur Dakyns — it was such a very kind message19 he sent by you.e Here is a letter from Canning (then in office) on Bonaparte’s accession to power:20 “… The destroyer of the National Representation of the French Republick is a public benefactor to Europe. I care not whether he restores a King or becomes himself a Despot, so that he be bloody and tyrannical enough. Heaven prosper all his projects against French liberty and Republican Principles, whatever they may be! But as to peace … No — No — No! I hope that will be easily fought off. If the old form of things … had endured and the rest of Europe had been dastardly, we might have found some difficulty in carrying on the war. But now it is our own faults if we do not take on a new lease of it.” He was the man who called liberty into existence in the New World “to redress the balance of the Old” — and at the same time swept away the Spanish monopoly of S. American trade. It is comforting to observe how much our statesmen have advanced in morals and enlightenment since that time … Love to E.
Your aff
B Russell.
Please bring money Wed. Am short.
- 1
[document] The letter was edited from the signed, handwritten original in Frank Russell’s files in the Russell Archives. The letter was approved by an unidentified prison official, “HB”.
- 2
Your letter came early Dated 12 July 1918 (BRACERS 46925).
- 3
Miss King As she explained in her note on the verso of the letter from Frank, his secretary, E.S. King, forgot to remind Elizabeth Russell to add a message of her own before the couple left Gordon Square for Telegraph House.
- 4
Lippincott Despite various efforts by Frank and suggestions from BR (see Letters 30, 32 and 34), the contract with Lippincott for Roads to Freedom could not be located. (See Letter 21, note 5, for the initial trouble with the Lippincott contract.) However, a typed carbon copy, with seals, is in the Russell Archives (BRACERS 70492) and dated 11 October 1917.
- 5
English publication … Oct. at latest Roads to Freedom was not published in Britain until 1 December 1918. See note 9 to Letter 74.
- 6
Spectator BR wanted it for the review of Mysticism and Logic. See note 9 to Letter 44.
- 7
Beresford’s God’s Counterpoint This novel (London: Collins, 1918) by the English writer and theosophist J.D. Beresford (1873–1947) concerned the baneful effects of Puritanism, which its austere principal character, publisher’s assistant Philip Maning, eventually repudiates.
- 8
Pirrie … I agree with him, not the Canadian During the weekend of 6–7 July, which Frank and Elizabeth had spent as guests of Lord and Lady Pirrie (see Letter 34), the chairman of Harland and Wolff had forecast a continuation of the war “for another three years”. In this letter to his brother, Frank also informed BR that an unidentified “Canadian officer” staying with the Pirries had predicted (with slightly more accuracy) “that the fighting would be over in fifteen months” (12 July 1918). As Controller-General of Merchant Shipbuilding since March 1918, Pirrie was entrusted with offsetting the devastation of Britain’s merchant marine by German U-boats and was almost duty-bound to assume that the conflict would be protracted.
- 9
Duke of Rutland … praying for rain In a letter to The Times (“The Prayer for Rain”, 9 July 1918, p. 7), Henry Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland (1852–1925) warned that Britain’s harvest was in jeopardy from two months of drought. He therefore humorously urged the Bishops to instruct all clergy to recite the Anglican prayer for rain. When the weather did finally break a few days later, another editorial correspondent to the newspaper quipped: “Archbishops prayed for wet; their prayers were vain: / Rutland wrote to the The Times — and there was rain” (G. Stuart Robertson, “The New Elijah”, 12 July 1918, p. 9).
- 10
Nevinson Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856–1941), socialist, suffragist, crusading journalist and war correspondent. On 5 July 1918 Elizabeth Russell reported to BR that Nevinson had been asking after him, and five days later Rinder wrote that “Nevinson again sends you kindest regards” (BRACERS 46923 and 79618).
- 11
Mrs Huth Jackson … she was Tiny Grant Duff at Twickenham Writer and society hostess Annabel (“Tiny”) Huth Jackson (née Grant Duff, 1870–1944) was a childhood friend of BR’s and a frequent visitor to Pembroke Lodge from York House, her nearby Twickenham home. Although often terrorized by Frank, she remembered these excursions fondly and BR as a “solemn little boy in a blue velvet suit … always kind” (A Victorian Childhood [London: Methuen, 1932], p. 62). On 10 January 1917 she had communicated to BR her admiration of “the perfectly splendid stand you have made for principles against the whole of England” (BRACERS 1646).
- 12
ω “Greek long o.” (BR’s marginal note at BRACERS 116670.)
- 13
To Miss Wrinch. Given any ω-limit.… This method is therefore hopeless. In a letter of July 1918 (BRACERS 81965) Wrinch wrote:
“I am very much intrigued by this problem. Can one, sans MULT AX, specify one progression in the case of every ordinal ω ⊢ ω1 except those which have immediate predecessors, which is limited by the ordinal? If I can, I believe that one can prove ω1 is not an ω limit. I mean is there one way of specifying one out of each class
‘progressions limited by ζ ’
where ζ ∈ limeszahl between ω ⊢ ω1. ??
“I am anxious about this but can’t put out exactly how it arises at the moment. Do you think it possible?”
Wrinch’s query concerned the vexed question of how much of transfinite set theory can be salvaged without MULT AX, the Multiplicative Axiom, Whitehead and BR’s version of what is now known as the Axiom of Choice (PM, *88.03). In effect her question was whether, without the Axiom of Choice, it was possible to prove that there is a choice function on the set of limit ordinals between ω, the ordinal number of the sequence of natural numbers, and ω1, the first uncountable ordinal (PM **263, 265). (The term “limeszahl”, “limit number”, is from Hausdorff, Grundzüge der Mengenlehre [Leipzig: Veif, 1914], p. 106, which Wrinch was reading.) If it is, then she thought it might be possible to prove that ω1 was not an ω-limit. BR’s reply was not encouraging. He pointed out that, without the Axiom of Choice, one could not prove the existence of such a choice function (“no rule can be given”), even though, in any particular case, a choice could be made. Moreover, he went on to say that if one assumed, what Wrinch was hoping to prove, namely that ω1 was not an ω-limit, then he thought it could be proved that there was no such choice-function, so Wrinch’s method (of proving that there was a choice function and then proving that ω1 was not an ω-limit) was “hopeless”.
Not surprisingly, in view of this response, Wrinch did not take up this issue in any of her subsequent publications, though she did continue to examine the consequences of abandoning the Axiom of Choice, e.g., in her work on mediate cardinals begun about this time and published as “On Mediate Cardinals”, American Journal of Mathematics 45 (1923): 87–92. (Mediate cardinals, now known as Dedekind cardinals, are too large to be mapped on to the natural numbers but too small to be mapped on to a proper subset of themselves. PM *124.61 showed that their existence was ruled out by the Multiplicative Axiom.) However, the claim that there was a choice function on the set of limit ordinals between ω and ω1, which Wrinch was hoping to prove without the Axiom of Choice, was later considered by Alonzo Church as a postulated alternative to it. Cf. Church, “Alternatives to Zermelo’s Assumption”, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 29 (1927): 178–208. - 14
notes on symbolism and behaviourism It is not clear what became of these notes. Two of the short manuscript notes written about this time and published in Papers 8, “Propositions” and “Thoughts on Language, Leading to Language of Thought” (18h and 18i of Papers 8), are on cognate topics, but they are dated 31 July (by Wrinch) and 10 August (by BR), respectively. Delays in communication from prison would allow “Propositions” to be one of the notes.
- 15
one or two Voltaire books Gladys Rinder, to whom BR later wrote about the French philosophe, brought him Sébastian G. Longchamp and Jean-Louis Wagnière, Mémoires sur Voltaire: et sur ses ouvrages (Paris: André, 1826), and Gustave Lanson, Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1906) (see BRACERS 116691, 4 Aug. 1918, and 79640, 19 Aug. 1918).
- 16
lot of Mirabeau books On 25 July 1918 BR told Ottoline that he was “absorbed in a 3-volume Mémoire of Mirabeau”, but the edition was not identified. Nor is it known what other books he received about Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791), a French aristocrat who was rejected by his class and became, despite his moderate views, an important leader of the revolutionary National Assembly.
- 17
I hear St. George blasphemed against mathematics. In a gossipy letter (n.d. [July 1918], BRACERS 81965) about that year’s joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Association, and the Mind Association (held at the University of London Club on 5–8 July 1918), BR’s student Dorothy Wrinch complained about St. George Lane Fox-Pitt (1856–1932) and his “UTTERLY IRRELEVANT criticism” of her paper, “On the Summation of Pleasures” (later published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 18 [1917–18]: 589–94). BR “should NOT have a cousin who says such bad things about MATHEMATICS.... He told me that Maths obscured the issue and misled people very much — and other things.” BR regarded Fox-Pitt, the son of his maternal aunt, Alice (Stanley) Lane-Fox (later Pitt-Rivers), as something of a crank. He was the defeated Liberal candidate at Wimbledon in 1906 and appeared on the platform with BR in the latter’s 1907 campaign in the same constituency (Auto. 1: 154).
- 18
extract about another Pitt See Lord Granville, Private Correspondence, 1781–1821 (London: J. Murray, 1917), 1: 18 (letter from Lady Stafford, 8 Dec. 1789). The mother of future diplomat Earl Granville (see note 9 to Letter 40) had been preparing her young son to meet the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, a talented mathematician who had studied the subject at Cambridge and retained an interest in it throughout his political life.
- 19
I am glad … Arthur Dakyns … kind message On 27 June 1918 Dakyns had told BR that he would “come from the ends of the earth to see him, even if only for a minute or two” (BRACERS 76251).
- 20
letter from Canning … Bonaparte’s accession to power See Lord Granville, Private Correspondence, 1781–1821 (London: J. Murray, 1917), 1: 273. Rising Tory politician George Canning (1770–1827) was a zealous opponent of revolutionary ideas and had been instrumental in establishing a publication, The Anti-Jacobin, to combat them. When he wrote to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower (19 Nov. 1799), Canning was serving as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the administration of William Pitt. As a senior statesman, at the Foreign Office (1822–27) and then (for the last four months of his life) as Prime Minister, Canning tempered the reactionary tendencies he had exhibited early in his career. Indeed, as BR hinted later in the same passage, he gained something of a liberal reputation for supporting independence movements in the Spanish Americas, backing the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule and favouring a relaxation of the Corn Laws.
57 Gordon Square
The London home of BR’s brother, Frank, 57 Gordon Square is in Bloomsbury. BR lived there, when he was in London, from August 1916 to April 1918, with the exception of January and part of February 1917.
A.N. Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Cambridge-educated mathematician and philosopher. From 1884 to 1910 he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and lecturer in mathematics there; from 1911 to 1924 he taught in London, first at University College and then at the Imperial College of Science and Technology; in 1924 he took up a professorship in philosophy at Harvard and spent the rest of his life in America. BR took mathematics courses with him as an undergraduate, which led to a lifelong friendship. Whitehead’s first major work was A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), which treated selected mathematical theories as “systems of symbolic reasoning”. Like BR’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903), it was intended as the first of two volumes; but in 1900 he and BR discovered Giuseppe Peano’s work in symbolic logic, and each decided to set aside his projected second volume to work together on a more comprehensive treatment of mathematics using Peano’s methods. The result was the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which occupied the pair for over a decade. After Principia was published, Whitehead’s interests, like BR’s, turned to the empirical sciences and, finally, after his move to America, to pure metaphysics. See Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: the Man and His Work, 2 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1985–90).
Arthur Dakyns
Arthur Lindsay Dakyns (1883–1941), a barrister, had been befriended by BR when Dakyns was an Oxford undergraduate and the Russells were living at Bagley Wood. BR once described Dakyns to Gilbert Murray as “a disciple” (16 May 1905, BRACERS 79178) and wrote warmly of him to Lucy Donnelly as “the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a real friend” (1 Jan. 1906; Auto. 1: 181). During the First World War Dakyns enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in France. BR had become acquainted with the H. Graham Dakyns family, who resided in Haslemere, Surrey, after he and Alys moved to nearby Fernhurst in 1896. He corresponded with both father and son.
Brixton Prison
Located in southwest London Brixton is the capital’s oldest prison. It opened in 1820 as the Surrey House of Correction for minor offenders of both sexes, but became a women-only convict prison in the 1850s. Brixton was a military prison from 1882 until 1898, after which it served as a “local” prison for male offenders sentenced to two years or less, and as London’s main remand centre for those in custody awaiting trial. The prison could hold up to 800 inmates. Originally under local authority jurisdiction, local prisons were transferred to Home Office control in 1878 in an attempt to establish uniform conditions of confinement. These facilities were distinct from “convict” prisons reserved for more serious or repeat offenders sentenced to longer terms of penal servitude.
Dorothy Wrinch
Dorothy Maud Wrinch (1894–1976), mathematician, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. She studied mathematics and philosophy at Girton College, Cambridge, and came under BR’s influence in her second year when she took his course on mathematical logic. She taught mathematics at University College, London, 1918–21, and then at Oxford, 1922–30. Her first publications were in mathematical logic and philosophy, and during the 1920s she wrote on the philosophy of science. But in the 1930s her interests turned to mathematical biology and crystallography, and in 1935 she moved to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and remained there for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, as a biologist she is best known for a long and stubborn controversy with Linus Pauling about the structure of proteins in which he was right and she was wrong. See Marjorie Senechal, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science (New York: Oxford U. P., 2013). Chapter 7 is devoted to Wrinch’s interactions with BR in Brixton.
Elizabeth Russell
Elizabeth Russell, born Mary Annette Beauchamp (1866–1941), was a novelist who in 1891 married Graf von Arnim-Schlagenthin. She became known as “Elizabeth”, the name she used in publishing Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), and she remained widely known as Elizabeth von Arnim, although the Library of Congress catalogues her as Mary Annette (Beauchamp), Countess von Arnim. She was a widow when she married BR’s brother, Frank, on 11 February 1916. The marriage was quickly in difficulty; she left it for good in March 1919, but they were never divorced and she remained Countess Russell (becoming Dowager Countess after Frank’s death in 1931).
Gladys Rinder
W. Gladys Rinder worked for the No-Conscription Fellowship and was “chiefly concerned with details in the treatment of pacifist prisoners” (BR’s note, Auto. 2: 88). More specifically, she helped administer the Conscientious Objectors’ Information Bureau, a joint advisory committee set up in May 1916 and representing two other anti-conscription organizations — the Friends’ Service Committee and Fellowship of Reconciliation — as well as the NCF. One C.O. later testified to her “able and zealous” management of this repository of records on individual C.O.s (see John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: a History, 1916–1919 [London: Allen & Unwin, 1922], p. 186). Rinder exhibited similar qualities in assisting with the distribution of BR’s correspondence from prison and in writing him official and smuggled letters. Her role in the NCF changed in June 1918, and after the Armistice she assumed control of a new department dedicated to campaigning for the immediate release of all imprisoned C.O.s. She appears to have lost touch with BR after the war but continued her peace advocacy, which included publishing occasionally on international affairs. In 1924 she travelled to Washington, DC, as part of the British delegation to a congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Decades later Colette remembered Rinder to Kenneth Blackwell as somebody who “seemed about 40 in 1916–18. She was a completely nondescript person, but efficient, and kind” (BRACERS 121687).
H. Wildon Carr
Herbert Wildon Carr (1857–1931), Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, London, from 1918 and Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California from 1925. Carr came to philosophy late in life after a lucrative career as a stockbroker. His philosophy was an idiosyncratic amalgam of Bergsonian vitalism and Leibnizian monadology, which, he thought, was supported by modern biology and the theory of relativity. He wrote books on Bergson and Leibniz at opposite ends of his philosophical career and a book on relativity in the middle. His philosophy would have made him an unlikely ally of BR’s, but it was Carr who organized BR’s two courses of public lectures, on philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of logical atomism, which brought BR back to philosophy and improved his finances in 1917–18. Carr had great administrative talents, which he employed also on behalf of the Aristotelian Society during his long association with it. He was its president in 1916–18 and continued to edit its Proceedings until 1929.
J. Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) was a prominent dissenter and founding member of the Union of Democratic Control. He had resigned as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party after most of his colleagues voted for the Asquith Government’s war budget in August 1914. After regaining the Labour leadership, MacDonald formed two minority administrations (1924 and 1929–31). He was still in office when he was persuaded, by an acute financial crisis, to accept the premiership of a Conservative-dominated National Government — thereby incurring the wrath of his party (from which he was expelled) for reasons quite different than in the First World War. BR respected MacDonald’s wartime politics but came to regard him as excessively timid and deferential. He later complained how, after becoming Prime Minister, MacDonald “went to Windsor in knee-breeches” (Auto. 2: 129).
Mary Hamilton
Mary Agnes (“Molly”) Hamilton (1882–1966), socialist peace campaigner, novelist and journalist, became one of the first members of the Union of Democratic Control in August 1914. She was acquainted with both Ottoline and the pacifist literary circle around her at Garsington Manor. After the war Hamilton served for a time as deputy-editor of the Independent Labour Party weekly, The New Leader, and was briefly (1929–31) Labour M.P. for Blackburn.
Maud Burdett
Maud Clara Frances Burdett (1872–1951) and BR were childhood playmates and had remained in intermittent contact ever since. She was a daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, 7th Baronet, whose family home in Richmond was close to Pembroke Lodge where BR grew up. Sensing her keen intelligence, BR was disappointed when Maud’s conventional mother and sister dissuaded her from entering Newnham College, Cambridge. BR’s anti-war stand later caused her “acute pain”, she wrote him on 29 April 1918 (BRACERS 75326), but this political disagreement did not deter her from wishing to visit him in Brixton. Although BR felt somewhat duly-bound to receive her, it is not clear that he ever did.
Ottoline Morrell
Lady Ottoline Morrell, née Cavendish-Bentinck (1873–1938). Ottoline, who was the half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland and grew up in the politically involved aristocracy, studied at St. Andrews and Oxford. She married, in 1902, Philip Morrell (1870–1943), who became a Liberal M.P. in 1910. She is best known as a Bloomsbury literary and artistic hostess. BR and she had a passionate but non-exclusive love affair from 1911 to 1916. They remained friends for life. She published no books of her own but kept voluminous diaries (now in the British Library) and was an avid photographer of her guests at Garsington Manor, near Oxford. (The photos are published in Lady Ottoline’s Album [1976] and mounted at the website of the National Portrait Gallery.) In the 1930s she had a large selection of BR’s letters to her typed, omitting sensitive passages. BR’s letters to her are with the bulk of her papers at the University of Texas, Austin.
Stanley Unwin
Stanley Unwin (1884–1968; knighted in 1946) became, in the course of a long business career, an influential figure in British publishing and, indeed, the book trade globally — for which he lobbied persistently for the removal of fiscal and bureaucratic impediments to the sale of printed matter (see his The Truth about a Publisher: an Autobiographical Record [London: Allen & Unwin, 1960], pp. 294–304). In 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction became the first of many BR titles to appear under the imprint of Allen & Unwin, with which his name as an author is most closely associated. Along with G.D.H. Cole, R.H. Tawney and Harold Laski, BR was notable among several writers of the Left on the publishing house’s increasingly impressive list of authors. Unwin himself was a committed pacifist who conscientiously objected to the First World War but chose to serve as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. With occasional departures, BR remained with the company for the rest of his life (and posthumously), while Unwin also acted for him as literary agent with book publishers in most overseas markets.
Telegraph House
Telegraph House, the country home of BR’s brother, Frank. It is located on the South Downs near Petersfield, Hants., and North Marden, W. Sussex. See S. Turcon, “Telegraph House”, Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin, no. 154 (Fall 2016): 45–69.
The J.B. Lippincott Company
J.B. Lippincott Company, founded in 1836, was one of the world’s largest publishers. How it came to approach BR in 1917 is unknown, but it followed upon the success of the Century Company’s US publication of Why Men Fight (1917), the retitled Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916). See Letter 21, note 6.
Frank Russell
John Francis (“Frank”) Stanley Russell (1865–1931; 2nd Earl Russell from 1878), BR’s older brother. Author of Lay Sermons (1902), Divorce (1912), and My Life and Adventures (1923). BR remembered Frank bullying him as a child and as having the character and appearance of a Stanley, but also as giving him his first geometry lessons (Auto. 1: 26, 36). He was accomplished in many fields: sailor, electrician, house builder, pioneer motorist, local politician, lawyer, businessman and company director, and (later) constructive junior member of the second Labour Government. Frank was married three times. The first marriage involved serious legal actions by and against his wife and her mother, but a previous scandal, which ended his career at Oxford, had an overshadowing effect on his life (see Ruth Derham, “‘A Very Improper Friend’: the Influence of Jowett and Oxford on Frank Russell”, Russell 37 [2017]: 271–87). The second marriage was to Mollie Sommerville (see Ian Watson, “Mollie, Countess Russell”, Russell 23 [2003]: 65–8). The third was to Elizabeth, Countess von Arnim. Despite difficulties with him, BR declared from prison: “No prisoner can ever have had such a helpful brother” (Letter 20).