REDISCOVERING CECIL ROBERTS

Introduced by Graham Harrison, Member, on 20 April 1999

Graham opened his talk by relating the circumstances which led to his rediscovery of Cecil Roberts (1892 - 1976), a prolific author in the 20s and 30s. His elder boy came home from school complaining that they had had to sit through an assembly addressed by a most boring Old Boy _ Cecil Roberts.

Graham read and enjoyed Roberts' travel book And So to Bath and so wondered whether his son's spot judgement had been quite fair, but after reading one of his 25 long-forgotten novels Pilgrim Cottage and volume two of his four-volume autobiography, he came to the conclusion that it had not been too wide of the mark.

Cecil was a terrific name-dropper, judging by his autobiography, and something of a snob in his predilection for the company of aristocrats in their chateaux and the rich and famous generally.

As for the novels, now all out of print, Pilgrim Cottage and So Immortal a Flower are typical. It is hard to see how Cecil managed to maintain his considerable reputation as a literary man, for Graham found him truly awful _ characters cardboardy and thin plots padded out with wodges of travel book descriptions of the places.

But Graham admitted he had ended up with a sneaking admiration for Cecil, a clever boy from a working-class background whose determination carved him out a career as journalist (editor at one time of the Nottingham Journal), literary man, lecturer and Parliamentary candidate, hobnobber with the great and the good and, finally, freeman of his native city.

Perhaps if he had skipped the fiction and stuck to travel he would be better remembered. His descriptive powers and wide range of contacts with the literary and political great also make his autobiography worth reading in spite of such passages as `Little did I know that some....years later I would meet .....in the Embassy in Rome....'.

The discussion ended with two cheers for Cecil, one member volunteering to read Pilgrim Cottage!

Graham Harrison