Russians that there is no promise for them in atomic war. Then the ?rst, vital
step will have to be taken.
We shall have to set up an arrangement under which all ?ssionable raw
material is owned by an international authority, and is only mined and
processed by that authority. No nation or individual must have access to
?ssionable raw material.
And there would have to be an international inspectorate to ensure that this
law is maintained.
The Russians have a morbid fear of being inspected. We shall have to help
them to overcome it. For until they are agreeable to it nothing can be e?ect-
ively done.
The H-bomb tests must be helping to persuade them. Hence to put o? the
tests would simply be to put o? the day of agreement. It goes without saying
that we, too, must always be ready to negotiate and to agree.
Once this ?rst, vital agreement has been reached it should be possible,
gradually, to extend international control.
That is the only answer I can see.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 53615
AT HOME AND ABROAD
More important than anything in pulling me through the dark apprehensions
and premonitions of these last two decades is the fact that I had fallen in love
with Edith Finch and she with me. She had been a close friend of Lucy
Donnelly whom I had known well at the turn of the century and had seen
something of during my various American visits as I had of Edith during my
years in the United States in the thirties and forties. Lucy was a Professor at
Bryn Mawr, where Edith also taught. I had had friendly relations with Bryn
Mawr ever since I married a cousin of the President of that College. It was the
?rst institution to break the boycott imposed on me in America after my
dismissal from the City College of New York. Paul Weiss of its Department
of Philosophy wrote asking me to give a series of lectures there, an invita-
tion which I gladly accepted. And when I was writing my History of Western
Philosophy, the Bryn Mawr authorities very kindly allowed me to make use of
their excellent library. Lucy had died and Edith had moved to New York
where I met her again during my Columbia lectures there in 1950.
Our friendship ripened quickly, and soon we could no longer bear to be
parted by the Atlantic. She settled in London, and, as I lived at Richmond, we
met frequently. The resulting time was in?nitely delightful. Richmond Park
was full of reminiscences, many going back to early childhood. Relating
them revived their freshness, and it seemed to me that I was living the past all
over again with a fresh and happier alleviation from it. I almost forgot the
nuclear peril in the joys of recollection. As we walked about the grounds of
Pembroke Lodge and through Richmond Park and Kew Gardens, I recalled all
sorts of things that had happened to me there. There is a fountain outside
Pembroke Lodge at which the footman, employed to make me not afraid of
water, held me by the heels with my head under water. Contrary to allmodern views, this method was entirely successful: after the ?rst application,
I never feared water again.
Edith and I each had family myths to relate. Mine began with Henry VIII,
of whom the founder of my family had been a protégé, watching on his
Mount for the signal of Anne Boleyn’s death at the Tower. It continued to my
grandfather’s speech in 1815, urging (before Waterloo) that Napoleon
should not be opposed. Next came his visit to Elba, in which Napoleon was
a?able and tweaked his ear. After this, there was a considerable gap in the
saga, until the occasion when the Shah, on a State visit, was caught in the rain
in Richmond Park and was compelled to take refuge in Pembroke Lodge. My
grandfather (so I was told) apologised for its being such a small house, to
which the Shah replied: ‘Yes, but it contains a great man.’ There was a very
wide view of the Thames valley from Pembroke Lodge marred, in my
grandmother’s opinion, by a prominent factory chimney. When she was
asked about this chimney, she used to reply, smiling: ‘Oh, that’s not a factory
chimney, that’s the monument to the Middlesex Martyr.’
Edith’s family myths, as I came to know them, seemed to me far more
romantic; an ancestor who in 1640 or thereabouts was either hanged or
carried o? by the Red Indians; the adventures of her father among the Indians
when he was a little boy and his family for a short time lived a pioneering life
in Colorado; attics full of pillions and saddles on which members of her
family had ridden from New England to the Congress at Philadelphia; tales of
canoeing and of swimming in rocky streams near where Eunice Williams,
stolen away by the Indians in the great massacre at Deer?eld, Massachusetts,
was killed. It might have been a chapter from Fennimore Cooper. In the Civil
War, Edith’s people were divided between North and South. Among them
were two brothers, one of them (a Southern General) at the end had to
surrender his sword to his brother, who was a Northern General. She herself
had been born and brought up in New York City, which, as she remembered
it, seemed very like the New York of my youth of cobbled streets and hansom
cabs and no motor cars.
All these reminiscences, however entertaining, were only some of the
arabesques upon the cake’s icing. Very soon we had our own myths to add to
the collection. As we were strolling in Kew Gardens one morning, we saw
two people sitting on a bench, so far away that they seemed tiny ?gures.
Suddenly, one of them jumped up and ran fast towards us and, when he
reached us, fell to his knees and kissed my hand. I was horri?ed, and so
abashed that I could think of nothing whatsoever to say or do; but I was
touched, too, by his emotion, as was Edith, who pulled herself together
enough to learn that he was a German, living in England, and was grateful to
me for something; we never knew for what.
We not only took long walks in the neighbourhood of Richmond and in
the autobiography of bertrand russell 538London, along the River and in the Parks and in the City of a Sunday, but we
sometimes drove farther a?eld for a walk. Once on the Portsmouth Road we
met with an accident. Through no fault of ours we were run into by a farm
lorry and our car was smashed to bits. Luckily, at the time there were plenty
of observers of our guiltlessness. Though shaken up, we accepted a lift from
some kind passers-by into Guildford where we took a taxi to Blackdown to
have our intended walk. There I recalled my infant exploits. My people had
taken Tennyson’s house during a summer’s holiday when I was two years
old, and I was made by my elders to stand on the moor and recite in a
heart-rending pipe,
O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
We went to plays, new and old. I remember particularly Cymbeline, acted in
Regent’s Park, Ustinov’s Five Colonels, and The Little Hut. My cousin Maud Russell
invited us to a party celebrating the achievement of the mosaic ?oor designed
by Boris Anrep in the National Gallery. My portrait summoning Truth from a
well occurs there with portraits of some of my contemporaries. I enjoyed
sittings to Jacob Epstein for a bust that he asked to make of me which I
now have.
These small adventures sound trivial in retrospect, but everything at that
time was bathed in the radiant light of mutual discovery and of joy in each
other. Happiness caused us for the moment to forget the dreadful outer
world, and to think only about ourselves and each other. We found that we
not only loved each other entirely, but, equally important, we learned grad-
ually that our tastes and feelings were deeply sympathetic and our interests
for the most part marched together. Edith had no knowledge of philosophy
or mathematics; there were things that she knew of which I was ignorant. But
our attitude towards people and the world is similar. The satisfaction that we
felt then in our companionship has grown, and grows seemingly without
limit, into an abiding and secure happiness and is the basis of our lives. Most
that I have to relate henceforth may be taken, therefore, to include her
participation.
Our ?rst long expedition was to Fontainebleau when the only reminder of
public squabbles was owing to Mussadeq’s attempt to secure a monopoly of
Persian oil. Apart from this, our happiness was almost as serene as it could
have been in a quiet world. The weather was sunny and warm. We consumed
enormous quantities of fraises du bois and créme fra?che. We made an expedition
into Paris where, for past services, the French radio poured unexpected cash
upon me that ?nanced an epic luncheon in the Bois, as well as solemner
things, and where we walked in the Tuileries Gardens and visited Notre
at home and abroad 539Dame. We never visited the Chateau at Fontainebleau. And we laughed
consumedly – sometimes about nothing at all.
We have had other holidays in Paris since then, notably one in 1954 which
we determined should be devoted to sight-seeing. We had each lived in Paris
for fairly long periods, but I had never visited any of the things that one
should see. It was pleasant to travel up and down the river in the bateaux
mouches, and to visit various churches and galleries and the ?ower and bird
markets. But we had set-backs: we went to the Ste Chapelle one day and found
it full of Icelanders being lectured to on its beauties. Upon seeing me, they
abandoned the lecture and crowded about me as the ‘sight’ of most impor-
tance. My remembrance of the Ste Chapelle is somewhat garbled. We retreated
to the terrace of our favourite restaurant opposite the Palais de Justice. The
next day we went to Chartres which we both love. But, alas, we found it
turned – so far as it could be – into a tourists’ Mecca full of post-cards and
souvenirs.
In the spring of ?fty-two we visited Greece where we spent some time in
Athens and then ten days or so driving through the Peloponesus. As everyone
does, we at once set o? for the Acropolis. By mistake and thinking to take a
short cut, we approached it from the back. We had to scramble up a cli? by
goat paths and through barbed wire to get there. We arrived scratched and
breathless, but triumphant. We returned again often by more orthodox
routes. It was very beautiful by moonlight. And very quiet; till suddenly, at
my elbow, I heard a voice say: ‘Mis-ter Russ-ell, is it not?’, with the accent
portentous upon each syllable. It was a fellow tourist from America.
The mountains were still snow-capped, but the valleys were full of blos-
soming fruit trees. Kids gambolled in the ?elds, and the people seemed
happy. Even the donkeys looked contented. The only dark spot was Sparta
which was sullen and brooding beneath Taygetus from which emanated a
spirit of frightening evil. I was thankful to reach Arcadia. It was as Arcadian
and lovely as if born of Sidney’s imagination. At Tiryns, the guardian of the
ancient citadel bemoaned the fact that it had been very badly restored. Upon
being asked when this distressing renovation had taken place, he replied,
‘During the Mycenaean times’. Delphi left me quite unmoved, but Epidaurus
was gentle and lovely. Oddly enough its peace was not broken by a bus-load
of Germans who arrived there shortly after us. Suddenly, as we were sitting
up in the theatre dreaming, a beautiful clear voice soared up and over us. One
of the Germans was an operatic Diva and, as we were, was enchanted by
the magic of the place. On the whole, our fellow tourists did not trouble us.
But the United States army did. Their lorries were everywhere, especially in
Athens, and the towns were noisy with the boisterous, cock-sure, shoutings
and demands of their men. On the other hand, the Greeks whom we met
or observed in passing, seemed gentle and gay and intelligent. We were
the autobiography of bertrand russell 540impressed by the happy way in which they played with their children in the
Gardens at Athens.
I had never before been in Greece and I found what I saw exceedingly
interesting. In one respect, however, I was surprised. After being impressed by
the great solid achievements which everybody admires, I found myself in a
little church belonging to the days when Greece was part of the Byzantine
Empire. To my astonishment, I felt more at home in this little church than I
did in the Parthenon or in any of the other Greek buildings of Pagan times.
I realised then that the Christian outlook had a ?rmer hold upon me than I
had imagined. The hold was not upon my beliefs, but upon my feelings. It
seemed to me that where the Greeks di?ered from the modern world it was
chie?y through the absence of a sense of sin, and I realised with some
astonishment that I, myself, am powerfully a?ected by this sense in my feel-
ings though not in my beliefs. Some ancient Greek things, however, did
touch me deeply. Among these, I was most impressed by the beautiful and
compassionate Hermes at Olympia.
In 1953, Edith and I spent three weeks in Scotland. On the way we visited
the house where I was born on the hills above the Wye valley. It had been
called Ravenscroft, but is now called Cleddon Hall. The house itself was kept
up, but during the war the grounds had got into a sorry condition. My
parents had, at their own instructions, been buried in the adjoining wood,
but were later at the family’s wish, transported to the family vault at Chenies.
On the way, too, we visited Seatoller in Borrowdale, where I had spent ?ve
weeks as a member of a reading party in 1893. The party was still remem-
bered, and the visitor’s book contained proof of a story that I had told Edith
without obtaining belief, namely that Miss Pepper, who had waited on us,
subsequently married a Mr Honey. On arriving at St Fillans (our destination)
I told the receptionist that I had not been there since 1878. She stared, and
then said; ‘But you must have been quite a little boy.’ I had remembered from
this previous visit various landmarks at St Fillans such as the wooden bridge
across the river, the house next to the hotel which was called ‘Neish’, and a
stony bay which I had imagined to be one of the ‘sun-dry places’ mentioned
in the Prayer Book. As I had not been there since 1878, the accuracy of my
memories was considered established. We had many drives, sometimes along
no more than cart tracks, and walks over the moors that remain memorable
to us. One afternoon, as we climbed to the crest of a hill, a doe and her fawn
appeared over the top trotting towards us and, on our way down, on the
shore of a wild little tarn, a proud and very tame hoopoe alighted and looked
us over. We drove home to St Fillans through the gloomy valley of Glencoe, as
dark and dreadful as if the massacre had just taken place.
Two years later we went again to St Fillans. This time, however, we had a far
less carefree time. We had to stop on the way in Glasgow for me to make a
at home and abroad 541speech in favour of the Labour candidate for Rotherglen, a tireless worker for
World Government. Our spirits were somewhat damped by the fact that I
had gradually developed trouble with my throat which prevented me from
swallowing properly, a trouble which I take pleasure in saying, resulted from
my e?orts to swallow the pronouncements of politicians. But much more
distressing than any of this was the fact that my elder son had fallen seriously
ill. We were beset by worry about him during the whole of this so-called
‘holiday’. We were worried, too, about his three young children who were at
that time more or less, and later almost wholly, in our care.
When Peter left me I had continued to live at Ffestiniog, happily working
there in a house on the brow of the hill with a celestial view down the valley,
like an old apocalyptic engraving of Paradise. I went up to London only
occasionally, and when I did, I sometimes visited my son and his family at
Richmond. They were living near the Park in a tiny house, much too small for
their family of three little children. My son told me that he wanted to give up
his job and devote himself to writing. Though I regretted this, I had some
sympathy with him. I did not know how to help them as I had not enough
money to stake them to an establishment of their own in London while I lived
in North Wales. Finally I hit upon the scheme of moving from Ffestiniog and
taking a house to share with my son and his family in Richmond.
Returning to Richmond, where I spent my childhood, produced a slightly
ghostly feeling, and I sometimes found if di?cult to believe that I still existed
in the ?esh. Pembroke Lodge, which used to be a nice house, was being
ruined by order of the Civil Service. When they discovered, what they did not
know until they were told, that it had been the home of famous people, they
decided that everything possible must be done to destroy its historic interest.
Half of it was turned into ?ats for park-keepers, and the other half into a tea
shop. The garden was cut up by a complicated system of barbed wire, with
a view, so I thought at the time, to minimising the pleasure to be derived
from it.
1
I had hoped vaguely that I might somehow rent Pembroke Lodge and
install myself and my family there. As this proved impossible, I took a largish
house near Richmond Park, turning over the two lower ?oors to my son’s
family and keeping the top two for myself. This had worked more or less well
for a time in spite of the di?culties that almost always occur when two
families live at close quarters. We had a pleasant life there, living separately,
each having our own guests, and coming together when we wished. But it
made a very full life, with the family coming and going, my work, and the
constant stream of visitors.
Among the visitors were Alan and Mary Wood who came to see me about a
book that he wished to write on my philosophical work. He soon decided to
do a life of me ?rst. In the course of its preparation we saw much of both him
the autobiography of bertrand russell 542and his wife and came to be very fond of them and to rely upon them. Some
of the encounters with visitors, however, were odd. One gentleman from
America who had suggested coming to tea, turned up accompanied by a
mistress of the American McCarthy whose virtues she extolled. I was angry.
Another was an Indian who came with his daughter. He insisted that she
must dance for me while he played her accompaniment. I had only a short
time before returned from hospital and did not welcome having all the
furniture of our sitting-room pushed back and the whole house shake as she
cavorted in what, under other circumstances, I might have thought lovely
gyrations.
That visit to the hospital became one of the myths to which I have already
referred. My wife and I had gone on a long walk in Richmond Park one
morning and, after lunch, she had gone up to her sitting-room which was
above mine. Suddenly I appeared, announcing that I felt ill. Not unnaturally,
she was frightened. It was the ?ne sunny Sunday before the Queen’s coron-
ation. Though my wife tried to get hold of a neighbour and of our own
doctors in Richmond and London, she could get hold of no one. Finally, she
rang 999 and the Richmond police, with great kindness and much e?ort,
came to the rescue. They sent a doctor who was unknown to me, the only one
whom they could ?nd. By the time the police had managed to get hold of our
own doctors, I had turned blue. My wife was told by a well-known specialist,
one of the ?ve doctors who had by then congregated, that I might live for
two hours. I was packed into an ambulance and whisked to hospital where
they dosed me with oxygen and I survived.
The pleasant life at Richmond had other dark moments. At Christmas, 1953,
I was waiting to go into hospital again for a serious operation and my wife and
household were all down with ?u. My son and his wife decided that, as she
said, they were ‘tired of children’. After Christmas dinner with the children
and me, they left, taking the remainder of the food, but leaving the children,
and did not return. We were fond of the children, but were appalled by this
fresh responsibility which posed so many harassing questions in the midst of
our happy and already very full life. For some time we hoped that their parents
would return to take up their r?le, but when my son became ill we had to
abandon that hope and make long-term arrangements for the children’s edu-
cation and holidays. Moreover, the ?nancial burden was heavy and rather
disturbing: I had given ￡10,000 of my Nobel Prize cheque for a little more
than ￡11,000 to my third wife, and I was now paying alimony to her and to my
second wife as well as paying for the education and holidays of my younger
son. Added to this, there were heavy expenses in connection with my elder
son’s illness; and the income taxes which for many years he had neglected to
pay now fell to me to pay. The prospect of supporting and educating his three
children, however pleasant it might be, presented problems.
at home and abroad 543For a time when I came out of the hospital I was not up to much, but by
May I felt that I had recovered. I gave the Herman Ould Memorial Lecture to
the ??? Club called ‘History as an Art’. We were asked to supper afterwards
by the Secretary of the Club and I enjoyed indulging my literary hates and
loves. In particular, my great hate is Wordsworth. I have to admit the excel-
lence of some of his work – to admire and love it, in fact – but much of it is
too dull, too pompous and silly to be borne. Unfortunately, I have a knack
of remembering bad verse with ease, so I can puzzle almost anyone who
upholds Wordsworth.
A short time later, on our way home to Richmond from Scotland, we
stopped in North Wales where our friends Rupert and Elizabeth Crawshay-
Williams had found a house, Plas Penrhyn, that they thought would make a
pleasant holiday house for us and the children. It was small and unprenten-
tious, but had a delightful garden and little orchard and a number of ?ne
beech trees. Above all, it had a most lovely view, south to the sea, west to
Portmadoc and the Caernarvon hills, and north up the valley of the Glaslyn to
Snowdon. I was captivated by it, and particularly pleased that across the valley
could be seen the house where Shelley had lived. The owner of Plas Penrhyn
agreed to let it to us largely, I think, because he, too, is a lover of Shelley and
was much taken by my desire to write an essay on ‘Shelley the Tough’ (as
opposed to the ‘ine?ectual angel’). Later, I met a man at Tan-y-Ralt, Shelley’s
house, who said he had been a cannibal – the ?rst and only cannibal I have
met. It seemed appropriate to meet him at the house of Shelley the Tough.
Plas Penrhyn seemed to us as if it would be an ideal place for the children’s
holidays, especially as there were friends of their parents living nearby whom
they already knew and who had children of their own ages. It would be a
happy alternative, we thought, to cinemas in Richmond and ‘camps’. We
rented it as soon as possible.
But all this was the daily background and the relief from the dark world of
international a?airs in which my chief interest lay. Though the reception
accorded Human Society in Ethics and Politics was so amiable, its publication had
failed to quiet my uneasiness. I felt I must ?nd some way of making the
world understand the dangers into which it was running blindly, head-on.
I thought that perhaps if I repeated parts of Human Society on the ??? it
would make more impression than it had hitherto made. In this, however, I
was thwarted by the refusal of the ??? to repeat anything that had already
been published. I therefore set to work to compose a new dirge for the
human race.
Even then, in the relatively early days of the struggle against nuclear
destruction, it seemed to me almost impossible to ?nd a fresh way of putting
what I had already, I felt, said in so many di?erent ways. My ?rst draft of the
broadcast was an anaemic product, pulling all the punches. I threw it away at
the autobiography of bertrand russell 544once, girded myself up and determined to say exactly how dreadful the
prospect was unless measures were taken. The result was a distilled version of
all that I had said theretofore. It was so tight packed that anything that I have
since said on the subject can be found in it at least in essence. But the ??? still
made di?culties, fearing that I should bore and frighten many listeners. They
asked me to hold a debate, instead, with a young and cheerful footballer who
could o?set my grim forebodings. This seemed to me utterly frivolous and
showed so clearly that the ??? Authorities understood nothing of what it was
all about that I felt desperate. I refused to accede to their pleadings. At last, it
was agreed that I should do a broadcast in December by myself. In it, as I have
said, I stated all my fears and the reasons for them. The broadcast, now called
‘Man’s Peril’, ended with the following words: ‘There lies before us, if we
choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we,
instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a
human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the
rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot,
nothing lies before you but universal death.’
The broadcast had both a private and a public e?ect. The private e?ect was
to allay my personal anxiety for a time, and to give me a feeling that I had
found words adequate to the subject. The public e?ect was more important. I
received innumerable letters and requests for speeches and articles, far more
than I could well deal with. And I learned a great many facts that I had not
known before, some of them rather desolating: a Battersea County Councillor
came to see me and told me of the provisions that the Battersea Council had
promulgated that were to be followed by all the inhabitants of that district in
case of nuclear attack. Upon hearing the warning siren, they were to rush to
Battersea Park and pile into buses. These, it was hoped, would whisk them to
safety in the country.
Almost all the response to the broadcast of which I was aware was serious
and encouraging. But some of my speeches had farcical interludes. One of
them I remember with some smug pleasure: a man rose in fury, remarking
that I looked like a monkey; to which I replied, ‘Then you will have the
pleasure of hearing the voice of your ancestors’.
I received the prize given by Pears’ Cyclopaedia for some outstanding work
done during the past year. The year before, the prize had been given to a
young man who ran a mile in under four minutes. The prize cup which I
now have says ‘Bertrand Russell illuminating a path to Peace 1955’.
One of the most impressive meetings at which I spoke was held in April,
1955, in memory of the Jews who died at Warsaw in February, 1943. The
music was tragic and beautiful, and the emotion of the assembled company
so deep and sincere as to make the meeting very moving. There were records
made of my speech and of the music.
at home and abroad 545Among the ?rst organisations to show a pronounced interest in my
views were the World Parliamentarians and, more seriously perhaps, the
Parliamentary World Government Association with whom I had many meet-
ings. They were to hold joint meetings in Rome in April, 1955, at which they
invited me to speak. We were put up, oddly enough, in the hotel in which I
had stayed with my Aunt Maude on my ?rst trip to Rome over a half century
before. It was a cold barracks that had ceased to provide meals for its guests,
but was in a pleasant part of the old city. It was Spring and warm. It was a
great pleasure to wander about the city and along the Tiber and up the Pincio
for the otherwise unprovided meals. I found the Roman meetings very mov-
ing and interesting. I was happy that my speeches seemed to a?ect people,
both at the meeting in the Chamber of Deputies and elsewhere. At all of them
there were very mixed audiences. After one, I was held up by a man almost in
tears because he had not been able to understand what had been said because
he spoke no English. He besought me to translate what I had said into
Esperanto. Alas, I could not. I enjoyed, too, meeting a number of friendly and
notable literary and political ?gures in whose work I had been interested but
with whom I had never before had a chance to discuss matters.
I had hoped, on the way north from Rome, to pay a visit to Bernard
Berenson at Settignano. In this I was prevented by the pressure of work. Later,
I learned that he took my defection very ill, especially as he had felt me, he
