A. K. Chesterton - Early Life

Early Life

Born in England, A. K. Chesterton was taken with his family to South Africa as a boy and did not return to England until the late 1920s. In 1915, he joined the British Army and was sent to East Africa, where he almost died of malaria and dysentery. After officer training, he was on the Western Front in 1917 with the Durban Light Infantry. He was awarded the Military Cross. His war experience was crucial to his repudiation of democracy. The war also left Chesterton broken in health and an alcoholic.

After the war, he was a journalist for the Johannesburg Star. He secured a job with the Stratford-on-Avon Herald back in England, where, as theatre critic from 1925 to 1929, he cultivated his aesthetic sense of societal decadence and cultural decline.

For the next four years, according to Chesterton's biographer, David Baker:

"he tilted at windmills and sharpened his skills as a controversialist while the Great Depression deepened and the bankruptcy of liberal and capitalist democracy became apparent. The corporate state, he came to believe, would rule in the interests of the whole nation, whereas democracy was the plaything of special interests and privilege."