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Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

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For the author and former curator of Watts Gallery, see Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Born(1840-08-17)17 August 1840
Petworth, Sussex, England
Died10 September 1922(1922-09-10) (aged 82)
England
Occupation(s)Poet, essayist
Known forPoetry, political activist, polemicist, adventurer, Arabian horse breeder
Spouse(s)Anne Blunt, 15th Baroness Wentworth
(m. 1869; died 1917)
ChildrenJudith Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (17 August 1840[1] – 10 September 1922[2]), sometimes spelt Wilfred, was an English poet and writer. He and his wife Lady Anne Blunt travelled in the Middle East and were instrumental in preserving the Arabian horse bloodlines through their farm, the Crabbet Arabian Stud. He was best known for his poetry, which appeared in a collected edition in 1914, and also wrote political essays and polemics. He became additionally known for strongly anti-imperialist views that were still uncommon in his time.

Early life

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Blunt was the son of Francis Scawen Blunt, of Crabbet, by his wife Mary Chandler.[3] Blunt was born at Petworth House in Sussex, home of his aunt's husband Baron Leconfield. He served in the Diplomatic Service 1858–1869. He was raised in the faith of his mother, a Catholic convert, and educated at Twyford School, Stonyhurst, and at St Mary's College, Oscott. He was a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas.[4]

Personal life

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Blunt in his 20s
Blunt caricatured by Ape in Vanity Fair, 1885

In 1869 Blunt married Lady Anne Noel, daughter of the Earl of Lovelace and Ada Lovelace, and granddaughter of Lord Byron.[5] Together the Blunts travelled through Spain, Algeria, Egypt, the Syrian Desert, and extensively in the Middle East and India. Based upon pure-blooded Arabian horses they obtained in Egypt and the Nejd, they co-founded Crabbet Arabian Stud. They later bought a property near Cairo named Sheykh Obeyd to house their horse-breeding operation in Egypt.[6]

As an adult Blunt became an atheist, though he underwent episodes of faith.[7][8] His writings and some of his friendships show he gained a serious interest in Islam and became immersed in its reformist strands.[9][10] Blunt had supposedly become a convert to Islam under the influence of al-Afghani.[11] He agreed before he died to see a priest, Fr Vincent McNabb, and receive Communion,[12] so fulfilling a prediction of Sir William Henry Gregory, as recalled by his wife: "You will see Wilfrid will die with the wafer in his mouth."[13]

In 1882, Blunt championed the cause of Urabi Pasha, which led to him being barred from Egypt for four years.[14] Blunt was generally anti-imperialist as a matter of belief. His support for Irish independence led to imprisonment in 1888 for chairing an anti-eviction meeting in County Galway that had been banned by the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour.[15] He was held in Galway Prison, then at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.[16]

Blunt's three attempts to enter Parliament were unsuccessful. He stood as a "Tory Democrat" supporting Irish Home Rule at Camberwell North in 1885 and as a Liberal at Kidderminster in 1886, where he lost by 285 votes. While in prison in Ireland, he contested a Deptford by-election in 1888, but lost by 275 votes.[16]

His most memorable line of poetry on the subject comes from Satan Absolved (1899), where the devil, answering a Kiplingesque remark by God, snaps back: "The white man's burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash."[17] Here, Elizabeth Longford wrote, "Blunt stood Rudyard Kipling's familiar concept on its head, arguing that the imperialists' burden is not their moral responsibility for the colonised peoples, but their urge to make money out of them."[18] Edward Said mentions Blunt by name when describing late 19th and early 20th century Orientalist authors: "[he] believed his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs" and "expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East." Notably, Said marked Blunt as exceptional in not exhibiting most other Orientalists' "final...traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient."[19]

Wilfrid and Lady Anne's only child to reach maturity was Judith Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth, later known as Lady Wentworth. She was married in Cairo when she was an adult, but in 1904 she relocated permanently to the Crabbet Park Estate.

Wilfrid had mistresses, including long-term relations with a courtesan, Catherine "Skittles" Walters, and a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris. He seduced and impregnated his cousin Mary Wyndham, having previously been the lover of her mother.[20] Eventually he moved another mistress, Dorothy Carleton, into his home. This triggered Lady Anne's legal separation from him in 1906. At the time, Lady Anne signed a Deed of Partition drawn up by Wilfrid, under terms unfavourable to Lady Anne, whereby she kept the Crabbet Park property, where their daughter Judith lived, and half the horses, while Blunt took Caxtons Farm, also known as Newbuildings, and the rest of the stock. Always struggling with financial concerns and chemical dependency issues[clarification needed], Wilfrid sold off numerous horses to pay debts and constantly attempted to obtain additional assets. Lady Anne left the management of her properties to Judith and spent many months of each year in Egypt at the Sheykh Obeyd estate, moving there permanently in 1915.[6]

Due primarily to Wilfrid's manœuvring to disinherit Judith and obtain the entire Crabbet property for himself, Judith and her mother were estranged at the time of Lady Anne's death in 1917. As a result, Lady Anne's share of the Crabbet Stud passed to Judith's daughters, under the oversight of an independent trustee. Blunt filed a lawsuit soon afterwards.[15] Ownership of the Arabian horses went back and forth between the estates of father and daughter in subsequent years. Blunt sold more horses to pay off debts and shot at least four in an attempt to spite his daughter, an action which led to intervention of the trustee of the estate with a court injunction to prevent him from further "dissipating the assets" of the estate. The suit was settled in favour of the granddaughters in 1920 and Judith bought their share from the trustee, combining it with her own and reuniting the stud. Father and daughter briefly were reconciled shortly before Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's death in 1922, but his promise to rewrite his will to restore Judith's inheritance was not kept.[6]

Blunt was a friend of Winston Churchill, aiding him in a 1906 biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Blunt had befriended him in 1883 at a chess tournament.[21]

Work in Africa

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In the early 1880s, Britain was increasing its influence in Egypt. It established a "veiled protectorate" through military occupation in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War. In the autumn of 1881, Wilfrid Blunt's ship ran aground in the Suez Canal. Rather than remain idle at Suez for a few days, Blunt visited friends in Cairo. It is untrue that "he was sent to notify Sir Edward Malet, the British agent, of Egyptian public opinion about the recent changes in government and development policies." Blunt was in Cairo by accident and, again by accident, met Sheikh al Jasraji, who was close to Ahmed 'Urabi. Blunt then met his old friend Malet, the British Consul General, and began to play the role of intermediary.

In mid-December 1881, Blunt met with 'Urabi, known as Arabi or "El Wahid" (the Only One) due to his popularity with the Egyptians. 'Urabi was impressed with Blunt's enthusiasm and appreciation of Egyptian culture. Blunt was under the influence of Afghani's disciple, Muhammad Abduh and had recently written some articles on the future of Islam. Their mutual respect helped 'Urabi to peacefully explain the reasoning behind his new Egyptian nationalist movement, "Egypt for the Egyptians". Over the course of several days, Arabi explained the complicated background of the revolutionaries and their determination to rid themselves of the Ottoman oligarchy.

Wilfrid Blunt was not vital in the relay of this information to the British Consul General in Egypt, as everybody in Egypt knew that the indigenous Egyptians resented foreigners – whether they were Muslim Turko-Circassian or Christian Greek, Italian or Armenian – who were growing rich while the natives remained in poverty. Blunt felt he had been used by Malet and Auckland Colvin who were only pretending to be sympathetic to the Nationalists. However, Malet, Colvin, Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), and other British officials dismissed Blunt as a romantic idealist of a quixotic type. Indeed, his own claim to be for Arabs what Byron had been to the Greeks, was sufficient to make him utterly ridiculous to the British public because he was not considered a good poet, whereas Byron was considered one of the greatest British poets of all time.

After the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War, Blunt was banned from Egypt, while Urabi was exiled to Ceylon.

Blunt remained vigorously opposed to colonial expansion in Africa, writing three books outlining his views: The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt... (1907), Gordon at Khartoum (1911), and My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914 (2 vols. 1919–1920).

Historian Robert O. Collins wrote, "The most vigorous English advocate of Egyptian nationalism, Blunt was both arrogant and irascible, his works scathing, discursive, and at times utterly ridiculous. Immature and unfair, both he and his writings must be used with caution, but even the dullest of men will come away stimulated if not aroused and with fresh insights to challenge the sometimes smug attitudes of British officials in Whitehall and Cairo. Of course, to them Blunt was anathema if not disloyal and Edward Mallet, the British Consul-General at Cairo from 1879 to 1883, replied to Blunt's charges in his posthumously published Egypt, 1879–1883 (London, 1909)."[22]

Egyptian Garden scandal

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In 1901, a pack of foxhounds was shipped to Cairo to entertain the army officers. A fox hunt then took place in the desert near Cairo. The fox was chased into Blunt's garden, and the hounds and hunt followed it. As well as a house and garden, the land contained the Blunts' Sheykh Obeyd stud farm, housing a number of valuable Arabian horses. Blunt's staff challenged the trespassers – who, though army officers, were not in uniform – and beat them when they refused to turn back. For this, the staff were accused of assault against army officers and imprisoned. Blunt made strenuous efforts to free his staff, much to the embarrassment of the British army officers and civil servants involved.[23]

Bibliography

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  • Sonnets and Songs. By Proteus. John Murray, 1875
  • Aubrey de Vere (ed.): Proteus and Amadeus: A Correspondence Kegan Paul, 1878
  • The Love Sonnets of Proteus. Kegan Paul, 1881
  • The Future of Islam Kegan Paul, Trench, London 1882
  • Esther (1892)
  • In Vinculis (1889)
  • Griselda Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893
  • The Quatrains of Youth, 1898
  • Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery. J. Lane, London 1899
  • Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, 1903
  • Atrocities of Justice under the English Rule in Egypt T. F. Unwin, London, 1907
  • Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt Knopf, 1907
  • India under Ripon; A Private Diary[24] T. Fisher Unwin, London 1909
  • Gordon at Khartoum. S. Swift, London 1911
  • The Land War in Ireland. S. Swift, London 1912
  • The Poetical Works. 2 vols. . Macmillan, London 1914
  • My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914. Secker, London 1919–1921; 2 vols. Knopf, New York 1921
  • Poems. Knopf, New York 1923; Macmillan, London 1923.

Notes

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  1. ^ "Index entry (birth)". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  2. ^ "Index entry (death)". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  3. ^ William Smith Ellis "The Parks and Forests of Sussex", p. 71
  4. ^ Joseph Pearce (2002). Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. Ignatius Press. pp. 189–. ISBN 978-0-89870-942-1.
  5. ^ "Index entry (marriage)". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
  6. ^ a b c Wentworth, The Authentic Arabian Horse
  7. ^ "Wilfred Scawen Blunt was notorious as an atheist, a libertine, an adventurer and a poet. Somehow he found time to be a diplomat – one of the country's earliest to make a real attempt to understand Islam – and an anti-imperialist, becoming the first British-born person to be jailed for Irish independence." Phil Daoust, The Guardian, 11 March 2008, G2: Radio: Pick of the day, p. 32.
  8. ^ Elizabeth Longford, 1979. A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; pp. 120–122, 132 and 235–237.
  9. ^ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1882. The Future of Islam. London: Kegan Paul, Trench. [1]
  10. ^ Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen., 1922. Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt; being a personal narrative of events. New York: Alfred Knopf; p. 120. [2]
  11. ^ Johnson, K. Paul (1 January 1995). Initiates of Theosophical Masters. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-2555-8.
  12. ^ Elizabeth Longford, 1979. A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; p. 422.
  13. ^ Lady Gregory, The Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy, 1978. (Vol I), p. 6.
  14. ^ New International Encyclopedia
  15. ^ a b Alice Spawls (21 September 2012). "In the saddle". LRB blog. London Review of Books. Retrieved 21 September 2012.
  16. ^ a b Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 6. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 358.Article by Elizabeth Longford.
  17. ^ Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion, Knopf, New York 1979 p.335, citing Blunt's Poetical Works, 2.254
  18. ^ Elizabeth Longford, 'Wilfred Scawen Blunt' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
  19. ^ Said, Edward. "Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism's Worldliness." In Orientalism. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
  20. ^ Claudia Renton. Those Wild Wyndhams (2014), pp. 235-8, 241-3
  21. ^ Dockter, Warren (Autumn 2011). "The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills" (PDF). Journal of Historical Biography. 10 (2): 70–102.
  22. ^ Robert O. Collins, "Egypt and the Sudan" in Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations and Resources (Duke U.P., 1966) p. 282. The Malet book is online
  23. ^ See papers relating to the scandal in "Wilfrid Blunt's Egyptian Garden: Fox hunting in Cairo, Uncovered Editions, The Stationery Office 1999.
  24. ^ Note: Ripon refers to George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon

References and further reading

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