Philip Mairet - Life

Life

He was educated at the Hornsey School of Art, becoming a draughtsman and designer of stained glass. As a young man he worked in graphic design for Charles Robert Ashbee, becoming part of his community at Chipping Campden, and illustrating Conradin: A Philosophical Ballad (1908). He then worked for Patrick Geddes.

His wife Ethel Mairet (1872 - 1952) (previously married to Ananda Coomaraswamy) was an influential weaver and teacher, settled in Ditchling, Sussex and was associated with The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. She was born Ethel Mary Partridge and trained at the Royal Academy of Music; her marriage to Coomaraswamy lasted from 1903 to 1913. They met because Philip had come to Ditchling to work as a labourer. He was avoiding conscripted military service during World War I, and developed an interest in glass-making. He was that at time influenced by Dimitrije Mitrinović, attached to the Serbian Delegation in London, who met Mairet in 1917. Eventually Mairet was discovered, enrolled in the British Army, and spent a period in prison.

From 1921 to 1924 he worked as an actor, at the Old Vic. He began attending Orage's editorial meetings.

Orage died suddenly in 1934, leaving the New English Weekly in limbo. Mairet, then the literary editor, emerged as the editor by a complex route: one group of Social Credit advocates wanted to exclude another group, of supporters of Mitrinović. Mairet was identified more with a third faction, the Chandos Group, around Maurice Reckitt, with Travers Symons, V. A. Demant, and Alan Porter. This overlapped the Mitrinović group: there had been a shared interest in the journal Purpose, from 1929, and the theories of Adler were also a common factor. Symons introduced Mairet to T. S. Eliot, who was holding the ring. In practical terms the Chandos Group were already deeply involved in producing the New English Weekly, and were sympathetic to Social Credit.

He belonged to numerous other small societies and discussion groups of the period before World War II. He joined Rolf Gardiner's Kinship in Husbandry group in 1941. He edited The Frontier for Walter Moberly's Christian Frontier Council.

He was an early supporter of George Orwell, giving him literary work for the New English Weekly, and writing in very positive and comprehending terms about Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's approach. A friend and long-time correspondent also of T. S. Eliot, who dedicated his Notes towards the Definition of Culture to Mairet, he became one of the best-connected of all the British Christian intellectuals of that time.