Edward Harold Begbie - Political Views

Political Views

He acted as ghostwriter for the memoir of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.

In 1902 and 1903, Begbie, together with J.Stafford Ransome and M.H.Temple wrote, under the pseudonym Caroline Lewis, two parodies based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, entitled Clara in Blunderland and Lost in Blunderland. These novels deal with British frustration and anger about the Boer War and with Britain's political leadership at the time.

By 1916, dismayed by the attacks being made on Lord Haldane by Leopold Maxse in the National Review, he began to question the government's domestic policy. In 1917, he publicly defended the rights of pacifists and conscientious objectors to oppose the war. He later wrote his best known work under the pseudonym of "A Gentleman with a Duster", in which various anomalies and injustices were exposed.

Begbie strongly defended the reality of the alleged apparition of the Angels of Mons and attacked Arthur Machen for claiming they derived from his story "The Bowmen". Begbie printed numerous accounts of the "Angels" in his book On the Side of the Angels (1915) but these are generally anonymous, second-hand or otherwise unverifiable.

Before the First World War Begbie was an outspoken Liberal social reformist, but he moved rapidly to the right in the post-war period. The "Gentleman with a Duster" books denounce sexually suggestive literature (such as the early plays of Noël Coward), lament the precarious economic state of the middle classes and the prospective disintegration of the British Empire, and call for a strong hand against left-wing subversives even if this means restricting some traditional British liberties.