1915: Hilaire Belloc

Last updated August 2023

Hilaire Belloc would perhaps count as one of the better known (and more unlikely) of the GA Presidents. I come across his books now and again in second hand bookshops and they are always rather pricey. His legacy persists.

Belloc wouldn't make an obvious candidate for President of the Association, but he was in fact a great traveller as well as a famous author and commentator. He was also involved at a time when the Association appointed some high profile people as President. This was a time to fight for the subject's recognition. He was what Chris Kington in 2002 called "an outsider President".

Belloc was born in France in 1870, and his travel writing showed his ability to describe landscapes, as well as some of his poetry.

From the Wikipedia page for Belloc:

His best travel writing has secured a permanent following. The Path to Rome (1902), an account of a walking pilgrimage he made from central France across the Alps and down to Rome, has remained continuously in print. 
More than a mere travelogue, The Path to Rome contains descriptions of the people and places he encountered, his drawings in pencil and in ink of the route, humour, poesy, and the reflections of a large mind turned to the events of his time as he marches along his solitary way. 
His book The Pyrenees, published in 1909, shows a depth of detailed knowledge of that region such as would only be gained from personal experience. At every turn, Belloc shows himself to be profoundly in love with Europe and with the Faith that he claims has produced it.

Although he was born in France, he was brought up in England and lived most of his life here. After school, and time spent serving his French national service, he went to Balliol College, Oxford to study History (not Geography - several other Presidents did not begin as Geographers)

He became President of the Oxford Union and was later elected the MP for Salford.
He was a prolific author and poet for most of the early 20th Century, and many of his books are still in print.

I read a few sources to try to find out what his link was with Geography and why he should have become the President during the First World War.

This was a time of upheaval for the Association generally, as the war was inevitably disrupting many areas of society.

The membership of the Association was growing, at over 1100 members by the end of Keltie's Presidency, but many Branches stopped their activity for the duration of the war, and then there was the death of Professor A J Herbertson, one of the founders of the Association who had done so much to drive its growth. He died in July 2015, and his wife died a few weeks later. At the time, he was both Honorary Secretary and Honorary Editor of 'The Geographical Teacher' journal. The journal continued under the editorship of H O Beckit and Percy Maude Roxby (who became President in 1933, and will receive his own entry at the appropriate time)

Belloc had a Historical angle to his work, and he wrote a book on the contribution of the River Thames to England's history.
In 1904, he published a book called 'The Old Road', which described a walk along the Old Pilgrim's Way. He also wrote volumes of poetry and work for children too.

Belloc was one of the Big Four of Edwardian Letters along with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G.K. Chesterton, men who engaged in controversy and debate with one another for a generation or more.

There's not a great deal of information about what Belloc did while in post at the GA. This was a time when the First World War curtailed some activity and some branches closed down. He was not, according to Balchin's Centenary History of the Association 'au fait with the geographic academic world', and the Honorary Corresponding Secretary Dr. Unstead also resigned at this time. It seems that 1915 was a year for 'surviving' through to 1916, when a familiar name took over the role of Presidency, as we will see in a future post. 1915 also saw the death of A. J. Herbertson, who I will also write about in the next addition to this blog.

The Annual report for this year made the point that memberships may have lapsed as the members were on active service at the front, and perhaps had other things on their mind than renewing their GA membership. Some were Prisoners of War as well.

In 2003, an article by another former President: Jeremy Krause, explained that:

 Belloc's Presidential address, reported in Geography's predecessor The Geographical Teacher (Mackinder, 1916), was entitled 'Materialistic interpretations of geographical influences in history', but it was never written up, so we have no record of what he said.

This Notes page in the Geographical Teacher may be relevant:


“NOTES.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 8, no. 1, 1915, pp. 15–15. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40554405.
MacKinder referred to it in his own Presidential Address where he outlined some areas he thought needed 'correction'. We will never know what they were, but it was a slightly anomalous Presidential biography compared with those who went before and after him.

Sources
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilaire_Belloc

New World Encyclopaedia:
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hilaire_Belloc

1915 Report: “ANNUAL REPORT OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR 1915.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 8, no. 4, 1916, pp. 217–217. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40554493.

Image copyright:
Portrait by Emil Otto Hoppé, vintage bromide print, 1915 - shared under CC license from Wikipedia

As always, if anyone has further information relating to this former President, and his legacy as GA President or work done during his time in role,  please get in touch.

Update - Late June 2019
Spooky coincidence today. I was talking to parents at the Celebration Morning at school, and Belloc's name came up in connection with Woking. It turns out he wrote some rhyme regarding the opening of a mosque. He was not in favour of the 'rise of Islam' in the UK.

This led me to do a little more focussed search than I had done previously, and came across this website, which had a lot more on Belloc's life.

It explores a book called 'The Four Men' which sounds like it has a very geographical theme to it. It is set in Sussex.

Here's part of the analysis of the book by Sussex historian Lucy Broadwood

As the four men talk and walk, they pass through the High Weald of eastern Sussex with “its little pointed hills”, and into the South Downs that dominate the western part of the county. We are always reminded that the landscape is ancient and rooted in the history of past generations:-

So all along the road we went under Chanctonbury, that high hill, we went as the morning broadened: along a way that is much older than anything in the world….By that way we went, by walls and trees that seemed as old as the old road itself, talking of all those things men talk of, because men were made for speech and for companionship…

The landscape is almost a fifth companion and the cause of much discussion and reflection among the four travellers. There is one memorable moment in the book, when Myselfbeholds the full moon rising over Chanctonbury on Hallowe’en. We are invited to see a mystical interaction taking place between the ancient hilltop and the ‘holy moon’ shining down on its prehistoric features. Belloc, the Catholic, often seems more like Belloc, the pagan.

This beloved landscape was indeed a home to Belloc – a spiritual as well as a physical home. As they approach the end of their journey, they stop one last time to drink and sing in a country inn. “I knew myself indeed to be still in my own county”, says Myself, “and I was glad inside my heart, like a man who hears the storm upon the window, but is himself houseled by the fire…”

Also check out his poem Ha'nacker Mill'

This also had a link to some recording of Belloc's voice, so this is perhaps the earliest audio of a GA President.


New sources
https://belloc-broadwood.org.uk/the-four-men/
http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/hanacker-mill/

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-inexplicably-enduring-appeal-of-hilaire-bellocs-cautionary-tales

Description of Belloc from this article:
He infuriated his enemies (H. G. Wells among them) but so charmed his admirers (Gilbert Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, and George Bernard Shaw, among others) that they forgave him every excess. “He made his friends laugh until they ached,” his biographer, A. N. Wilson, writes. “He was ebulliently well-informed, spontaneously hilarious, mischievous and, at the same time, tough.” Just the man, in other words, to mock the crumbling pillars of the British Empire.

And I couldn't locate the particular poem about Woking that I was told.... I'll keep looking...

Finally for this update.
Belloc's home in London where he lived for a while has a BLUE PLAQUE: how many other GA Presidents' houses have a BLUE PLAQUE?
https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/hilaire-belloc

Update - thanks to Jeremy Krause - late July 2019

Belloc produced a War Map in 19015 showing the Western Front. He spoke French of course, and I'm not sure how that influenced his connections.
H. Belloc. ' Land and Water ' Map of the War and how to use it. Price 2s. 6d.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40554416

Update December 2019

Thanks to the London Review of Books taking down paywall for a month, I was able to read a review of a biography of Belloc published in 2002
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n04/e.s.-turner/in-praise-of-barley-brew

In 1913 his wife died, leaving him with five children. 

World War One found the ex-poilu and author of five books on famous battles a well-paid and respected military commentator in Land and Water, until his excessive optimism earned derision (a spoof entitled What I Know about the War by Blare Hilloc consisted of blank pages). 

In the 1920s he fought a six-year feud, and expended 100,000 words, in an attempt to deflate H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, which brushed aside Christianity and held that scientific progress was all.

Update September 2020

Spotted in a bookshop... A bit expensive though...

There's a blog about Belloc here.

It's called the HilaireBellocBlog.

There are lots of posts here with further details on Belloc, and his love for Sussex.

Updated July 2022

Someone has created a Twitter feed for Belloc with his quotes.

There's a few useful images on the feed which I hadn't seen before, which makes it quite useful to visit.

This quote was a good one:

"Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring."

Updated August 2023

An article on the power of his writing featuring a book written about him by a Sussex historian: Chris Hare.

"Belloc was a perpetual outsider – half French and wholly Catholic – he did not fit easily into the Edwardian world of polite society and Anglican values."

The book apparently mentions Belloc's anti-Semitism.

It would be interesting to see whether it mentions the Geographical Association at all.