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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 38 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: July 2000 Volume 38 Number 3, Pages 93–97 When Bertrand Russell Lived on Marlvern R. D. 1 Bertrand Arthur Wiiliam Russell, of the British titles 3rd Earl Russell and Vicount Amberley, spent the years 1938 to 1944 in America. After a lifetime of success as a philosopher, mathematician, educator and author, his years in America found him unemployed, discontented and often near poverty. Almost half of his American years were spent at Little Datchet Farm on Pigeon Run off Pickering Creek in West Pikeland Township - Post Office address Malvern R. D. 1. Russell tells what brought him to Chester County in the second volume of his autobiography, Bertrand Russell 1914-1944. He wrote of beginning his teaching in Chicago with a large seminar, excellent students and a department not all of one opinion and therefore of great strength and enrichment to the university. Apart from the seminar, he found the rest of his time in Chicago disagreeable. The city he called beastly and the weather vile. In March of 1939 he went to California where his lectures at UCLA were to begin in the fall. War broke out in Europe while his two children from his second marriage (John and Kate) were visiting him in America, so they were unable to return to England. Living with Russell at the time was his third wife Patricia (Peter) Spence Russell, and their infant son Conrad. Toward the end of the academic year 1939-1940, Russell was invited to become a professor at the College of the City of New York. He had liked living in California but found the educational climate wanting. He was dissatisfied, noting that the people were not so able and the president of the university was a man for whom he had a profound aversion. Russell had just resigned at UCLA when he learned the appointment in New York was not settled. It was too late to withdraw his resignation. He writes, "Earnest Christian taxpayers had been protesting against having to contribute to the salary of an infidel...." Russell attributed much of his difficulty in New York to the Catholic Church, but it was the Episcopal bishop who brought suit against the college. Since the suit in the Supreme Court of New York was between the college and the bishop, Russell was not allowed to testify. About this he was livid. Russell was declared a corrupter of youth by the court for what the bishop called his moral and salacious views. Presented as evidence was Russell's attack on religion in What I Believe published in 1925 and Manners and Morals in 1929. With the court decision against him, invitations for lectures were no longer forthcoming, although he did give the William James lectures at Harvard in the autumn of 1940. Russell had three children and a wife to support. John, his eldest child, was in college in California, and Kate was at Radcliffe. His resources in England were not available due to wartime restrictions on the transfer of money out of the country. Coming to Russell's aid was the eccentric art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes, creator of the Barnes Foundation at Merion, Pennsylvania. Barnes hired Russell at $8000 a year effective January 1, 1941 to teach a few hours a week in his course on Art Appreciation. The course had come about when Barnes, who at first allowed any and all to view his paintings, heard visitors laughing and jeering at his most startling Picasso paintings. Now no one was allowed in his gallery without first taking his Art Appreciation course. Russell would enlighten the students on Philosophy. Russell had been warned that Dr. Barnes (who had made his fortune developing the drug Argyrol which became a household cure for sore throats and common colds) was difficult, and support of his teachers was often short lived, so he held out for a five-year contract. Barnes found housing for the Russells, Little Datchet Farm, a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse at Malvern about thirty miles from Philadelphia, near his own country place in Chester County. The relationship with Barnes was terminated at the end of 1942. The feisty millionaire broke with Russell after only two years. He might have tolerated Bertrand, but he could not abide Peter. One day she drove Bertrand to the Barnes Foundation and sat inside at his lecture, although Barnes had not given her permission to enter the gallery. She was removed and forced to wait outside in the car. Effective January 1, 1943, Barnes dismissed Russell. In response, Russell sued for breach of contract and won the case, but no money came to him until after he had returned to England in 1944. At the farm, because of a lack of cash, the Russells were forced to move into the cottage that was presumably the expected residence for a couple who served the main house. They rented the main house to supplement their income. Russell received a loan from Simon and Schuster as an advance on a book. With these funds, and the help of friends, they survived. Friends also arranged lectures. This saved Russell some embarrassment over his predicament. Newspaper clippings from this era filed at the library of the Chester County Historical Society confirm Russell's residence in our neighborhood, and a map resource shows the location of Little Datchet Farm near the Pikeland churches. One clipping taken from the Phoenixville Daily Republican in 1952 gives a particularly vivid recollection of the great difficulties between the Russells and their neighbors. The house was frequently stoned, and windows broken at night. The author of a column "Sense and Nonsense", Phoebe H. Gilkyson, liked Russell and had him to dine. She felt local residents disliked the Russells because of their British accents and differences in behavior. She couldn't credit the locals with any understanding of philosophy. The headline of her column was "Famous Man Jinxed While in Chester County." Another publication recalled that in his last weeks here, awaiting ship space to England, he trooped daily with a parcel of children (including son Conrad), his white hair flying, to watch the four o'clock afternoon train come over the trestle bridge at Pickering Creek. Information about the Russells leaving the county also appeared in a newspaper report of a public auction held on October 4, 1944 of household furnishings left at Little Datchet Farm when they departed. A crowd of about 150 persons, mostly curious, made their way back a long, rutted country lane to see, and possibly buy, something that belonged to them. A more intimate portrait of Bertrand Russell when he lived in Malvern in the early 1940s unexpectedly appeared in a recently published book by Daphne Phelps, A House in Sicily. Phelps, and a friend she identifies only as "David," became close friends with Russell and his third wife, Peter, in 1940 when both displaced couples were living in the American west - but with a deep longing for home in England. Daphne and David were students at Berkeley, and the Russells were spending the summer at Lake Tahoe awaiting Bertrand's teaching duties at UCLA. The young couple was invited to the resort for a picnic, and then was encouraged to stay for several days. The Russell family at that time was Bertrand, Peter and two-year old Conrad. The Russell relationship had begun seven years earlier when Peter was a twenty -three-year-old student and Bertrand was a sixty-one-year-old professor. Peter at 23 had been a great beauty, with a startling wit and provocative opinions. She smoked a small pipe that matched her auburn hair. In 1940, at Lake Tahoe, she was thirty, about the same age as Daphne. After the severe set-back at the College of the City of New York, life was beginning to go better for the Russells. Bertrand had just received the offer from Dr. Barnes. He had a lecture date at Harvard in the fall, and would report to the Barnes Foundation on New Year's Day of 1941. Daphne and David were coming East in the spring of 1941 to await convoys home to Britain. The Russells urged them to spend the waiting time with them in Pennsylvania. They were to contact the Barnes Foundation for the Russell's Pennsylvania address. This proved to be an impossibility. Neither the Foundation nor the Lower Merion police would give them the information. Contact was finally made through Daphne's aunt who lived in Malvern. The Russells were tenants at Little Datchet Farm. Daphne and David stayed there with Bertrand, Peter and Conrad from April of 1941 until August of that year when they finally secured passage back to Britain on separate convoys. Men and women did not travel together in war time. The Russells were welcoming hosts. The household included a serving couple and a nurse maid. Conrad was the only child still at home. (John and Kate had returned to college.) Daphne noticed Bertrand was neither a faithful nor considerate husband, but the real difficulties in the marriage that were to come were not yet apparent. Bertrand was working on A History of Western Philosophy while at Malvern. This, his most popular and lucrative book, grew out of his lectures at the Barnes Foundation. Daphne Phelps remembers a slightly different story of Russell's break with the ever volatile Dr. Barnes. She says it came about because Peter insisted upon knitting for "Bundles for Britain" during one of Bertrand's lectures. When Barnes complained, she held that the lectures were not of a level that demanded much of her attention. Much less could have inflamed the vitriolic Barnes. Later apologies made no difference. Dr. Barnes was unforgiving. Daphne continued her friendship with the pair when they returned to England in 1944. Peter and Conrad arrived first and stayed in Daphne's London flat. When Bertrand returned he was quickly reinstated as a fellow at Trinity College. A year later he published his best seller, A History of Western Philosophy. In 1950 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, being cited for "his many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought." In later years, Daphne noted, Bertrand's popularity continued and, as Peter reached middle age, she grew jealous and unkind in her treatment of her then elderly husband. Peter's assertiveness that had seemed attractive when she was young was now not well received. The marriage eventually dissolved. Daphne was a supportive friend to Bertrand in his great loneliness between his third and fourth marriages. Bertrand Russell lived to be 98 years old. He continued writing almost to the end. He died in 1970, having published his three-volume autobiography from 1967 to 1969. TopSources Greenfeld. Howard, "The Devil and Mr. Barnes : Portrait of an American Art Collector". [New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1 987, pages 1 99-214] Morse, Joseph Laffan, editor, "Bertrand Russell". [New York: Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, 1 973, volume 20, pages 443-444] Newspaper Clipping Files, Library of the Chester County Historical Society Phelps, Daphne, "A House in Sicily". [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999, pages 172-178] Russell, Bertrand, "The Autobiography of ..., Volume 2, 1914-1944". [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968, pages 331-342] |
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Page last updated: 2009-05-22 at 17:20 EDT |