Aylmer and Louise Maude - From 1897: England & Travel

From 1897: England & Travel

Many of the British business people in late 19th century Russia prospered and were able to plan for early retirement; Aylmer Maude gave up his trading career before he reached 40. He, Louise, and family arrived in England in 1897 ready to live a different kind of life. At first the family stayed a short time in Croydon with the Brotherhood Church, a Tolstoyan group believing in co-operative ideals and non-violence. Their next home was in Essex at Wickham's Farm in Bicknacre, associated with the adjacent Brotherhood Church commune at Cock Clarks, Purleigh which they helped establish and to which they gave financial support until it came to an end in 1899. At least two of their sons went to the Friends (Quaker) school at Saffron Walden.

In 1898 Maude sailed from Liverpool to Quebec with representatives of the Doukhobors, a group supported by Tolstoy, who were persecuted in Russia for their beliefs and wanted to resettle in Canada. He confessed to the "un-Tolstoyan self-indulgence" of arranging a first-class cabin for himself. Maude wrote about this journey and the Doukhobors in A Peculiar People (1904).

The Maudes soon moved to Great Baddow near Chelmsford where they were members of the Fabian Society and co-operative movement. Aylmer was on the Fabian national executive from 1907-1912, lectured for the society, and wrote one of their pamphlets in association with Bernard Shaw. His lecturing talents included a "pleasing smile, manly and unruffled demeanour" and a "beautiful voice" according to the writer William Loftus Hare, who also described him as a "lucid, confident, instructive, persuasive" speaker.

Some years after leaving Wickham’s Farm, Maude would express doubts about communal living, feeling it could only succeed with a strong leader or shared traditions, and he called the Purleigh commune a "queer colony". "The really sad part of the Tolstoy movement was the terrible amount of quarrelling . . ."

While Aylmer Maude did not stick rigidly to a Tolstoyan set of ideas, and was associated with a variety of causes and campaigns, he never wavered in his admiration of Tolstoy, even when he held different views: ". . .though Tolstoy is sincere and wise, he, like all mortals, makes mistakes. . ."

In 1913 Maude was in Hampstead lodging in the household of Marie Stopes and her first husband. There was probably a "flirtatious friendship" between Stopes and Maude, but there is no hint of this in Maude's books, The Authorised Life of Marie C. Stopes (1924) or Marie Stopes: her work and play (1933). Stopes' campaign to make contraception freely available to married women was another cause supported by Maude.

Maude travelled to Archangel (now Arkhangelsk) in Russia with the British North Russian Expeditionary Force in 1918, acting as interpreter and liaison officer, and lecturing while there for the Universities' Committee of the YMCA to both Russian- and English-speakers, to both civilian and military audiences. The 60-year-old lecturer found himself under fire from "Bolsheviki", but was more interested in ideas than fighting. Later he suggested that "world statesmen" faced with the Russian revolution had "missed an opportunity to make the world 'safe for democracy'".

During their later years, the Maudes were occupied with preparing a comprehensive edition of Tolstoy's works. Their private resources were dwindling, but Aylmer Maude was granted a Civil List pension for services to literature in 1932. His death in 1938, aged 80, brought newspaper headlines describing him as "Authority on Tolstoy" and "Friend of Tolstoy". Louise died the following year.