Hilaire Belloc – a fighter for truth who made his home in Sussex

Local historian Chris Hare grew up with the writer and former MP – not in person, as Belloc died nine years before he was born, but hearing his verse recited by his mother.

Chris is giving at illustrated talk on Hilaire Belloc at Chichester Arts Centre on Wednesday, July 16, at 7pm as part of the Festival of Chichester. Booking for this talk and all Chris’ other talks and guided walks can be found at www.tickettailor.com/events/historypeople

Chris says: "My mother had been born in Horsham and went to school locally; at that time Belloc was living out his older years at Kingsland in Shipley. Belloc made his mark on Horsham when he lived there, and his spiritual presence was still felt in the years that followed.

"About 25 years ago, I was teaching an adult education class at Horsham, looking at the history of Sussex from the earliest times till the present day. One of the older members of the class was a lady called Sheila Abrams, who had lived locally all her life. She remembered Belloc coming to her school and telling the children that the most precious possession they had was how they spoke – by which he meant the Sussex dialect.

"Belloc knew that his adopted county, with its rich rural traditions and country ways, could not survive the onslaught of modernisation and urbanisation that was pouring out of London and 'flooding all the ways to the sea'. It was a matter of profound regret to him that a culture that had endured and survived the Norman Conquest, the Reformation and Civil War, was no being stifled by affluence and an age of money and material possessions.

"Belloc had been born in a village outside of Paris in 1870, to an English mother and a French father. Within two years of his birth, disaster had struck on many fronts: his father had died unexpectedly at an early age, France had been militarily crushed by Prussia at the Battle of Sedan, and revolution had broken out in Paris. The French authorities regained control, but only after terrible bloodshed. Little wonder then that Hilaire’s mother, Bessie, fled with her children, back to England.

"Bessie had some savings which she entrusted to a city stockbroker, whom she believed to be a friend. However, instead of giving her a good return, he either lost the money on bad investments, or simply embezzled it – whatever the truth, Bessie and her family were forced to drastically reduce their expectations.

"In 1872, reduced middle class expectations meant giving up the hope of living in fashionable London and instead moving to the country. Bessie took her young family to Slindon in West Sussex. Today, living in Slindon is highly desirable, with properties fetching premium prices; but back in the 1870s, rural living was still associated with poverty and a lack of culture.

"The young Belloc delighted in exploring the South Downs and losing himself in the ‘sublime void’ of a landscape almost entirely given over to sheep, and where no distracting noise of motor car, aeroplane, or chainsaw, had even been imagined. He sat for hours on Halnaker Hill, looking out to see, sketching, and writing poetry.

"So it was that these early experiences shaped the man. All his life Belloc loved isolated places, rolling hills, and the peace of an open sea. He detested with equal passion: German militarism, revolutionaries, and city financiers. The glue that kept this combustible potion from igniting was the solace and comfort in found in the Catholic Church and its teachings. As a young man, Belloc met Cardinal Manning, who was then very old. The cardinal’s belief that 'all conflict is ultimately theological' became Belloc’s guiding principle and helped steer him through the tumultuous seas of his life.

"During his career, Belloc was a Member of Parliament, and journalist, an editor, a travel writer, a poet, and a man who, above all, cared for the natural world and the spiritual calling, to which he believed, all humans should answer, and by which all humans could be saved from the machinations and duplicity of the modern world.

"Belloc spent much of his life in the midst of controversy and never seemed more himself than when taking up a cause others believed to lost. He valued friendship, but would not put it before principle. He sought moments of quiet and reflection, but he would never shirk from a fight he believed needed fighting: '…it is always worthwhile, I think, to hammer at truths which one knows to be important', he wrote, 'even those which seem to others, at their first statement mere nonsense. For though you may die under the imputation of being a man without a sense of proportion, or even a madman, yet reality will in time confirm you effort'.

"During the 1920s Belloc was an isolated figure politically, appearing to be on the Left on matters of social justice, but sounding very conservative on questions of family and religion. In 1927, during a BBC radio broadcast, he considered what the future might hold for humanity."

Belloc wrote: "The industrial civilisation which, thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore end its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude, leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs…., based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens. Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert. Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves, with a few rich men controlling them, take your choice.”

Chris continues: "He loved biding his times in old English country pubs, but warned: 'When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England'.

"By the 1930s, the peace and solitude of his beloved South Downs was under attack from the new forms of transport: 'You may hear the machine-gun fire of a motor bicycle on the greensward of Chanctonbury Ring,' he declared, 'There is no retreat wherein you can escape the blind inhuman mechanic clatter'.

"It was on the sea, in his old boat, The Nona, that Belloc continued to find the peace he craved: 'The Sea has taken me to itself whenever I sought it and has given me relief from men. It has rendered remote the cares and the wastes of the land; for of all creatures that move and breathe upon the Earth, we of mankind are the fullest of sorrow. But the sea shall comfort us, and perpetually show us new things and assure us. It is the common sacrament of this world. May it be to others what it has been to me'.

"In was in his great Sussex book, The Four Men, that Belloc has left us his most vivid and compelling evocation of the county he loved. Here, for example, is a particularly memorable description of the South Downs on a cold and frosty night: 'The moon stood over Chanctonbury, so removed and cold in her silver that you might almost have thought her careless of the follies of men; little clouds, her attendants, shone beneath her worshipping, and they presided together over a general silence. Her light caught the edges of the Downs. There was no mist. She was still frosty-clear when I saw her set behind those hills. The stars were more brilliant after her setting, and deep quiet held the valley of Adur, my little river, slipping at low tide towards the sea'."