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Thomas Sturge Moore

About: 

Thomas Sturge Moore was a poet, author, playwright, wood-engraver and critic. Moore was the brother of Bloomsbury philosopher G. E. Moore. He was good friends with William Butler Yeats (introduced by Laurence Binyon in 1899).

Moore helped correct English translations of Rabindranath Tagore and Purohit Swami, and was one of the people who nominated Tagore for the Nobel Prize. Moore's wife, Marie Sturge Moore, translated Tagore's The Crescent Moon into French, which appeared in 1924 under the title La Jeune Lune. After having introduced Purohit Swami to Yeats, Moore fell out with the Swami over his work on correcting the Swami's English. When Purohit Swami offered Moore £10 as part payment for his work, Moore became offended by the sum, not expecting any payment and rather expecting a share of the royalties. Moore was also friends with the Indian artist and engraver Mukul Dey who had taught at Tagore's Santiniketan and exhibited at Wembley in 1924.

Published works: 

Altdorfer (London: At the sign of the unicorn, 1900)

Absalom (London: Unicorn Press, 1903) 

The Centaur's Booty (London: Duckworth, 1903) 

Art and Life (London: Methuen, 1910)

Tragic Mothers (London: G. Richards, 1920)

The Powers of the Air (London: G. Richards, 1920)

Judas (London: G. Richards, 1923) 

Armour for Aphrodite (London: Cayme Press, 1929)

Mystery and Tragedy (London: Cayme Press, 1930)

The Poems of T. Sturge Moore, 4 vols. (London: Macmillans, 1931-33)

The Unknown Known and a Dozen Odd Poems (London: Martin Secker for Richards Press, 1939)

Moore, T. S.  and Moore, D. C. (eds), Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field (London: John Murray, 1933)

Date of birth: 
04 Mar 1870
Connections: 

Laurence Binyon, Katherine Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Mukul Dey, Aldous Huxley, Harold Monro, Marie Sturge Moore (wife), G. E. Moore (brother), George Russell (AE), Ranjee G. Shahani, Purohit Swami, Rabindranath Tagore, William Butler Yeats.

Secondary works: 

Bridge, Bridge (ed.), W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)

Gwynn, Frederick L., Sturge Moore and the life of art (London: Richards Press, 1952)

Kelly, John, ‘Moore, Thomas Sturge (1870–1944)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/58827]

Legge, Sylvia, Affectionate Cousins: T. Sturge Moore and Marie Appia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)

Archive source: 

Thomas Sturge Moore Papers, MS978, Senate House Library, University of London 

Letters to Rabindranath Tagore, Visva Bharati Archives, Santiniketan

Letters to Purohit Swami, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi

Letters from Purohit Swami, Add MS 45732, Manuscript Collection, British Library, St Pancras

City of birth: 
Hastings
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

T. Sturge Moore

Date of death: 
18 Jul 1944
Location of death: 
Windsor, England
Location: 

40 Well Walk, Hampstead, London

Tags for Making Britain: 

Edward John Thompson

About: 

Edward John Thompson was a historian, novelist and translator. He was an ordained Wesleyan (although he later resigned his ordination) and in 1910 he went to Bankura Wesleyan College in Bengal to teach English literature. In Bengal he became acquainted with Rabindranath Tagore, and was present in Santiniketan when Tagore heard that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The relationship between the poet and Thompson was often marked by tension and misunderstanding.

In 1923, Thompson settled in Oxford and taught Bengali to ICS probationers. He translated works from Bengali to English, and was involved with the India Society. In 1922 he wrote the introduction to a collection of short stories by Sita and Santa Chatterjee, entitled Tales of Bengal. He became a Leverhulme Research Fellow (1934–6), and Honorary Fellow and Research Fellow in Indian history at Oriel College (1936–40). He maintained contact and correspondence with many Indians, and also formed friendships with Indian students at Oxford and other Indian visitors to the UK. The Rhodes Trust funded several visits to India by Thompson in the 1930s and it was he who suggested that the Trust provide grants and prizes for Indian writers (although these plans did not come to fruition).

Thompson was a friend to Indian politicians, including those who visited the UK for the Round Table Conferences in the 1930s. Thompson had been involved in the suggestion of inviting Jawaharlal Nehru as Rhodes Visiting Lecturer to Oxford in 1940, but Viceroy Linlithgrow advised against this visit. Thompson had close contact with other Congress leaders such as M. K. Gandhi. He died in April 1946 before he could see independence realized for the subcontinent. 

Published works: 

Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921)

The Other Side of the Medal (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)

Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (London: Humphrey Milford, 1926)

A History of India (London: Ernest Benn, 1927)

An Indian Day (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927)

Suttee (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928)

Atonement (London: Heinemann, 1929)

The Reconstruction of India (London: Faber & Faber, 1930)

A Farewell to India (London: Ernest Benn, 1931)

A Letter from India (London: Faber & Faber, 1932)

The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India (London: Macmillan, 1934)

Burmese Silver (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)

The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)

The Making of the Indian Princes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943)

Date of birth: 
09 Apr 1886
Secondary works: 

Lago, Mary, India's Prisoner: A Biography of Edward John Thompson, 1886-1946 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001)

Lago, Mary, ‘Thompson, Edward John (1886–1946)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36487]

Parry, Benita, Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination 1880-1930 (London: Verso, 1998)

Symonds, Richard, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986)

Thompson, E. P., Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Archive source: 

Correspondence and papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Correspondence with Lord Lothian regarding 'Indian Lectureship', Rhodes House Archives, Oxford

Papers, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Elmhirst Collection, Dartington

William Rothenstein Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard

Correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Nehru (Gandhi), Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, Delhi

City of birth: 
Stockport
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

E. J. Thompson

Date of death: 
28 Apr 1946
Location of death: 
Bledlow, Buckinghamshire
Location: 

Bankura Wesleyan College, Bengal; Boars Hill, Oxford.

Tags for Making Britain: 

Clemens Palme Dutt

About: 

Clemens Palme Dutt was the elder brother of Rajani Palme Dutt. Both were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Clemens worked as a journalist, translator and editor, in particular of the works of Marx and Engels. The brothers’ Communist ideals were influenced from an early age by their father Dr Upendra Krishna Dutt’s activities as a doctor in a working-class part of Cambridge. While at university, Clemens and Rajani were involved with the Socialist Club where both came to the attention of the British authorities and remained under constant surveillance. Both brothers were founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

In the 1920s, both brothers were writing for Labour Monthly and for a time Clemens took over from his brother as editor. In the 1920s, he became actively involved with the Indian independence movement. Working as a journalist in London, he wrote in particular on India and the Indian independence struggle. In July 1923, he visited Berlin from Moscow, where he became closely associated with M. N. Roy, who was heading the Indian section of Comintern. He returned to London later that year under instructions from Comintern to assist Shapurji Saklatvala. In 1925, the CPGB established its own colonial bureau, which Clemens Palme Dutt headed. The bureau attempted to form connections in India, Palestine, China, Egypt and Ireland. He became the link between the CPGB colonial bureau the Comintern’s Indian section and Indian Communists in Europe and India. In 1927, together with N. J. Upadhyaya and Ajoy Banerji, he founded the Indian Seamen's Union in London. By then he was also on the London Council of the Workers' Welfare League of India, working in close cooperation with Saklatvala. During this period Palme Dutt visited Liverpool several times to help with the organization of Indian seamen by local Communists active in the port.

In March 1928, Clemens Palme Dutt was asked by Reginald Bridgeman to join the Executive Committee of the British Section of the League Against Imperialism. In 1928, Palme Dutt returned to Moscow as a member of a sub-committee of the Executive Committee of the Comintern to advise on the Indian situation. In the 1930s, he worked on the editorial staff of the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and acted as the Chairman of the Indian Section of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He also represented the Indian Seamen’s Union on the Executive of the League Against Imperialism. Palme Dutt worked as part of the Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee. In August 1930, he replaced Percy Glading as head of the Colonial Department of the CPGB. In 1930, together with Saklatvala, he helped to found the Workers' Section of the London Branch of the Indian National Congress. In June 1931, he was part of a sub-committee of the Colonial Bureau of the CPGB to organize Indian students in Britain.

In late 1931 he moved to Berlin and later to Moscow where he met Violet Lansbury (daughter of George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party in the early 1930s) whom he married in 1936 and with whom he had a daughter. During the Spanish Civil War, Palme Dutt worked together with Krishna Menon and the India League to collect donations for an ambulance for Spanish Republicans. By early 1939 Palme Dutt, his wife and daughter had returned to Britain permanently. He continued to work for the CPGB, addressing meetings and writing articles.

Published works: 

Biology: An Introductory Course for Casses and Study Circles (London: Labour Research Department, 1925)

Labour and the Empire (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1929)

As editor and translator:

Engels, Friedrich, Herr Eugen Duehring’s Revolution in Science-Anti-Duehring, trans. by Emile Burns and ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934)

Engels, Friedrich, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy...With an appendix of other material of Marx and Engels relating to dialectical materialism, ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934)Engels, Friedrich, The Housing Question, ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Martin Lawrence, 1935)

Marx, Karl, The Poverty of Philosophy, with an introduction by Frederick Engels, ed. by C. P. Dutt and V. Chattopadhyaya (London: Martin Lawrence, 1936)

Frolov, Yury Petrovitch, Pavlov and his School. The Theory of Conditioned Reflexes, trans. by C. P. Dutt (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1937)

Critique of the Gotha Programme...With Appendices by Marx, Engels and Lenin, ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938)

Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, trans. by C. P. Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940)

Marx, Karl, Selected Works of Karl Marx, ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1942)

The Soviet Worker Looks at the War: Selections from the Moscow Fortnightly War and the Working Class, ed. by C. P. Dutt (London: Labour Monthly, 1944)

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, Weissbuch der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands ueber die muendliche Verhandlung im Verbotsprozess...in Karlsruhe ('The Karlsruhe Trial for banning the Communist Party of Germany'), trans. by C. P. Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956)

Date of birth: 
15 Apr 1893
Connections: 

Robert Page Arnot, Olive Budden, Ajoy Banerji, Reginald Bridgeman, Rose Cohen, Claud Cockburn, Shripat Amrit Dange, Upendra Krishna Dutt (father), Rajani Palme Dutt (brother), Pazl Elahi, Percy Glading, Don Phillip Rupasangha Gunawardena, W. M. Holmes, Douglas Hyde, George Lansbury, Harold Laski, V. K. Krishna Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sylvia Pankhurst, Picasso, M. P. Rathbones, M. N. Roy, Bill Rust, Shapurji Saklatvala, Pulin Behari Seal, Mohamed Ali Sepassi (Khushi Mohammed), Philip Spratt, Robert Stuart, John Strachey, N. J. Upadhyaya.

Communist Club, Battersea; Communist Party of Great Britain; Indian Bureau; Indian Seamen’s Union; Meerut Prisoners Defence Committee; National Union of Journalists; Workers' Welfare League for India.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Daily Worker

Labour Monthly

Secondary works: 

'Announcement of Death', The Times (14 April 1975), p. 24

Owen, Nicholas, The British Left and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)
 

Archive source: 

L/PJ/12/28, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

L/PJ/12/29, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

KV2/2504, National Archives, Kew

KV2/2505, National Archives, Kew

 

Involved in events: 

Meerut Conspiracy Trials

City of birth: 
Cambridge
Country of birth: 
England

Location

Cambridge, CB1 2PY
United Kingdom
52° 11' 46.9428" N, 0° 11' 55.4748" E
Date of death: 
01 Apr 1975
Location of death: 
Goring on Thames
Location: 

Cambridge, London.

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