The swish farmhouse where
HG Wells played games with Express editor Blumenfeld
Easton Glebe, where HG Wells entertained the rich and famous
WHO would have thought that the editor of one of the biggest-selling newspapers in the world was often found legs akimbo and bleeding, sprawled under a heap of panting Cabinet Ministers, authors and artists just inside the net on a hockey pitch, as one of the biggest selling authors in the world blew a whistle and disallowed his goal.
Such playful Sundays were a way of life for Express editor Ralph Blumenfeld and author H.G.Wells, both at the height of their fame. They were neighbours in the historic Essex town of Dunmow, as was Evening Standard editor Howell Gwynne and a coterie of other leading lights of the day.
Blumenfeld and Wells had opposing political views but were close friends and enjoyed the arguments with each other.
Wells, a socialist, lived and entertained in a large, rambling, rented Georgian farmhouse called Easton Glebe, on the edge of an estate owned by his friend Daisy Greville, Countess Warwick, reputed to be one of the best-dressed women in the world.
He had a hockey pitch, tennis courts and a stage for amateur theatricals. At night the games went inside for charades, bridge and debates on socialism over copious amounts of brandy. His favourite role on these play days was to be referee at hockey matches for the rich and famous. Visitors included George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Charlie Chaplin, Gordon Selfridge and actress Ellen Terry.
Wells plays his games with guests at Easton Glebe in Dunmow
Blumenfeld said: “I spent many a Sunday crawling about on my stomach like an anaconda in the schoolroom at Easton Glebe, with other Generals pushing battalions of lead soldiers and cannons around.
“I’ve watched Peter Pan author James Barrie, playing a cavalry leader carrying out a heavy execution on his stomach and one of the Great War heroes routed by Field Marshal H.G. Wells.”
On August 1, 1914, he wrote in his diary that he often took the Daily Express cricket team down to his home in Dunmow to play the local Easton Lodge Eleven. An Evening Standard team went too.
Blumenfeld, a Conservative, and the socialist Countess had a warm and close relationship even though they had opposing political views, just like the editor and Wells.
Blumenfeld was the editor of a right-wing newspaper who wrote right-wing leaders and founded the Anti-Social league, and she was a campaigning socialist who enjoyed eating off solid gold plates and entertained the most famous capitalists of the land, including royalty.
Her parties on her estate were legendary.
Blumenfeld said: “Daisy was the Queen of Society, and her entertainment would sometimes last a week. Dunmow was 40 minutes by rail from London and she would hire a special train for guests to come down.
“She would stage a game of medieval chess in her garden with a life size board and actors for chest pieces. Costumes for the chest pieces were specially made and cost a fortune. So did the endless bottles of champagne, the cages of larks and exotic birds from all over the world. Local crowds would gather at the gates with picnics, to watch the rich and famous come and go.
But during these partying years in the early 1900s, there was a darker side to life. Great Britain ran the biggest empire since the Romans, but the people of the East End of London were still living and working in conditions of abject degradation.
So disease-ridden and cold and hungry were they, that when American author Jack London visited us to research his non-fiction book ‘The People of the Abyss’, the shock of the experience never left him.
The book, read by the High Society of the day and often featured even in the right-wing Express, led to Wells, and the other famous frolickers at Easton Glebe to become Progressives. And that is what their socialist debates were about. Wells even wrote a book on it.
This must have proved difficult for the Conservative editor Blumenfeld. For if we scratch the surface of what was happening in the day, the poor did not read newspapers, even if they could read, or have the money to buy them. He had to tread carefully to keep his middle-class sales. And advertisers weren’t interested in the down and out.
Express founder Arthur Pearson had tried some years before to kick start regeneration of the London docks to provide jobs and security for the working folk he cared so much about … and he had played a part when he hired a man who they called The Navvy Poet, to be a reporter for the Express. His story follows.
FROM THE ASHES OF POVERTY
Pearson, fast losing his sight, was distressed with the poverty he had seen on the streets of London and the plight of those who were blind, without help and had lost their spirit.
Then a man named Patrick MacGill, pictured, stepped into his life. He was one of the thousands of Irish labourers who worked all over Britain digging out the trenches that became our network of canals and laying the roads or blasting through hillsides to make way for the railways. And their two worlds could not have been further apart.
Wherever MacGill went he saw the other face of the British Empire — children dying of hunger and the cold; whole families destitute and begging; women and men sleeping on the grass in parks covered by snow and drunks and prostitutes in alleys. Sometimes the bodies of dead babies, left on park benches.
Men like MacGill, from Donegal, were called Navvies, a shortened version of navigational engineer. They were poor themselves and mostly starving lads mostly from Ireland, with spades. Many were brought up by preachers.
When he was 14, MacGill tramped the roads of Scotland and got a job on the Glasgow-Greenock railway line by lying that he was 18. Poorly educated he began to read books and write poetry based on his experiences with the poor who lived on the outside of society, selling little collections for six old pence on the street.
One, called ‘By The Way’, began:
‘These be the little voices, rough and uncultured which
I’ve written in hut and model deep in the dirty ditch,
On the upturned hod, by the palace made for the idle rich.’
His poetry became popular, and he was nicknamed The Navvy Poet when a slim volume of his poems was published nationwide. Socialists read his poems at meetings and even turned them into songs for their rallies.
Pearson was both moved and impressed by the new poet. His words carved a place in the hearts of a mostly uncaring English Middle Class and would one day open a door to social reform, fairer wages and health care for the poor.
But that took decades of heartbreak to happen and men like H.G.Wells and Pearson, to move mountains far bigger than the Navvies did. Pearson opened his care centre for the blind and put the will to live back into the hearts of our blinded soldiers.
In 1911, the Express founder offered MacGill a job as a reporter and he accepted. But MacGill struggled with his new environment. He was unhappy writing about the colour of men’s socks, their neckties, the weather and pet shows. And frankly, he was not very good at it.
But that year the Express joined the battle to keep open the Thames Iron Works to help the jobless and homeless of the East End. MacGill’s poem The Men of the Thames was read out during the ‘Great Express Meeting’ in Greenwich demanding a warship be built on the river.

The paper drew up a petition to the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, demanding that a new warship be placed with the iron works. MacGill’s poem was also printed in full in the edition that day. It became his most famous work.
Reporter MacGill later provided a companion poem Back to Work for a Daily Express edition of December 31, 1911, when the strike ended with no warship being built. The Thames Iron Works closed in 1912.
He remained with the Express for only a short period of time. By 1913, after meeting the Rev Sir John Neale Dalton, tutor to the Prince of Wales, he was appointed King's Librarian to George V and worked at Windsor Castle translating Latin manuscripts.
He died in Florida in November 1963, aged 73. His poetry is among some of the most moving I have ever read.
TRUTH ABOUT JACK’S LONDON
Jack London was an American novelist, journalist and activist for the poor, but it was a trip to London and the area around Fleet Street and the City that made him famous and put him on the road to becoming a millionaire in Edwardian times.
He hated what he found when he got here and wrote about it with passion, taking pictures to go with his copy that were published in the Express and other newspapers.
He arrived in London in 1902, while Arthur Pearson was editor and was struck by the abject poverty of the East End. ‘I never conceived such a mass of misery in the world before,’ he confessed.
Disguising himself as a stranded sailor down on his luck, and living for a while in Whitechapel Workhouse, he observed and wrote tirelessly about the conditions he found. They were so bad, London claimed, he had to look at them a ‘second time’, to convince himself ‘that it was really so’.
The weather did not help his mood, either. ‘Been in England 11 days,’ he noted, ‘and it has rained every day. Small wonder the Anglo-Saxon is such a coloniser. I have heard of God’s Country, but this country is the country God has forgotten that he forgot.’
His book about us ‘The People of the Abyss’, published the following year, became a bestseller. It is as you would expect, a depressing and upsetting work.
NOTEBOOK:
CHURCHILL’S TRICKIEST BRIDGE HAND
On June 18, 1914, Lord Beaverbrook was playing Bridge with Winston Churchill and others at Admiralty House. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at that time. An aide entered the room and placed a red despatch box in front of him. There was silence as Churchill solemnly took out the key from his waistcoat and opened it, taking out a sheet of paper. A single sentence read: “Germany has declared war on Russia.” He passed it round not saying a word; stood up, took off his dinner coat and put on his suit jacket, passing his Bridge hand to the Beaver. Then he walked out of the room to mobilise the Fleet, at that time arguably the mightiest navy in the world.
From Blum & Taff, A Tale of Two Editors by Dennis Griffiths.
TERRY MANNERS
7 October 2024