Kingsley Martin

Basil Kingsley Martin (1897, London, England – 1969, Cairo, Egypt) was a British journalist who edited the left-leaning political magazine the New Statesman from 1930 to 1960.

The son of a socialist and pacifist minister, Martin grew up with a strong political influence in his life. After primary school he earned a scholarship to Mill Hill School. While still at school, Martin became liable to conscription. Being a pacifist, he was a conscientious objector to the war and refused to fight in it, but he did not object to serving as a medical orderly for a few months caring for wounded soldiers. He later joined, the Friends' Ambulance Unit, and in 1918 was sent to the Western Front to serve with them.

After the war he returned to academic life at Magdalene College, Cambridge. While studying at the college he became politically active and joined many groups such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Fabian Society. After obtaining his degree, Martin moved to the US to teach at Princeton University for a year. When he returned to England, Martin was hired as a book reviewer for the journal, The Nation. His employer also used his connections to get him a teaching job at the London School of Economics. As well as a new job, Kingsley also managed to publish one of his earlier books, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston. Kingsley remained at the LSE for three years, before he was offered a job as a leader writer at the Manchester Guardian. Martin accepted, and during his time there he published another work; French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

He became editor of the New Statesmen in 1930, taking up the post at the beginning of 1931. With Martin as editor, the New Statesman (renamed New Statesman and Nation after absorbing The Nation in 1931) became a significant influence on Labour politics. Martin was originally a pacifist, but abandoned this position in response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. During this period, Martin and the Statesman were criticised for pursuing an erratic response to the regime of Stalin in the Soviet Union. Martin was despised by George Orwell, and Martin's friend John Maynard Keynes complained that in regard to Stalin's Russia, Martin was "a little too full perhaps of goodwill. When a doubt arises it is swallowed down if possible." Despite all this, the circulation of the Statesman grew from 14,000 to 80,000 over the course of Martin's thirty years in the editor's chair..

Kingsley Martin remained at the New Statesmen until 1960 when he retired. In The Magic of Monarchy (1937) (described by Brian Pearce as an "excellent account") and The Crown And The Establishment,(1962) he put forward the first modern arguments for British Republicanism. In his last years he published two autobiographical works; Father Figures (1966) and Editor (1968).

Reviewing Father Figures, Margaret Cole described Martin as a "wonderfully good editor".