In this post David Hayton introduces his new volume in the Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series, Allen Leeper’s Letters Home, 1908–1912. An Irish-Australian at Edwardian Oxford.
Allen Leeper, Oxford undergraduate and future Foreign Office mandarin, wrote regularly to his family in Australia from 1908 until he left university in 1912. His letters record his experiences at Balliol College, Oxford, among a ‘golden generation’ decimated by the First World War, and on his extensive travels in Europe. They also contain glimpses of an emerging modernity: from air-displays by aviation pioneers in France to the first manifestations of the Cubist movement in art.
Collectively, Allen Leeper’s letters provide a vivid picture of a continent on the eve of profound change, written by someone whose background afforded a degree of objectivity.
Allen Leeper’s Letters Home, 1908–1912 is now published online by Cambridge University Press, with publication of the print edition to follow later this year. David’s Introduction to the volume is also available free to read.
I came across Allen Leeper and his letters almost by accident. Having seen his name several times while researching a biography of the historian Sir Lewis Namier, I knew that he was Australian by birth and education, that he and his brother Rex had been colleagues of Namier in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in the closing years of the First World War, and that Allen had been one of the two witnesses at Namier’s disastrous first marriage.
I had looked at some of Allen’s correspondence from the war years in the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, but was unaware of his prior association with Namier as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, until one morning in the Balliol archives when I found his name bracketed with Namier’s in an entry in the college register for 1908, announcing their admission on the same day.
The archivist told me that the college had Leeper’s undergraduate correspondence. She quickly produced four boxes of letters, written to Leeper’s family in Australia, and covering the entire period of his residence in Oxford, until 1912, when he left to take up a post in the British Museum.
I was anxious to have some contemporary comment on Namier as an undergraduate since the only material to hand about his Oxford days consisted of his own rather roseate and unreliable memories, and a few astringent reminiscences from college acquaintances. I fell upon the letters, searching avidly for references to Bernstein (Namier was not yet a naturalised Briton and had not adopted what he mistakenly thought sounded like a typical English surname).
An avid interest in politics, music, theatre and sport also brought Allen into contact with some of the great personalities and events of the age.
Although Allen mentioned Namier infrequently, I soon found myself absorbed in reading about Oxford life and his fellow undergraduates, the accounts of extensive travels in England and Ireland, where the Leeper family had originated (and many still lived), and across Europe, to Germany, France, Italy, and even Scandinavia, especially vacations spent in Berlin, where his sister was studying the piano. An avid interest in politics, music, theatre and sport also brought Allen into contact with some of the great personalities and events of the age.
Reading the letters quickly prompted the feeling that they deserved publication. If there was a point at which I reached a decision to try and edit them it was probably on reading Allen’s comments on the Australian cricket team selected for the test series in England in 1909. Sometimes said to be the greatest touring team ever to leave Australia, the list did not impress Allen. The batting (including Victor Trumper, Warwick Armstrong and Charlie Macartney) was just about adequate, while the bowling was hopeless. And indeed he seemed to be proved right when Australia were bowled out before lunch on the first day of the first test, and went on to lose by ten wickets. However, he would soon change his mind when the tourists went on to win the series 4–1.
His letters reveal a developing character, slowly emancipating itself from the influence of his family.
Allen arrived in Balliol with a cohort of brilliant undergraduates: besides Namier, his friends and acquaintances included the historians Arnold Toynbee, G.N. Clark and G.D.H. Cole, the classicist Rhys Carpenter, the philosopher Hamish Paton, the anthropologist Diamond Jenness, the popular historian Philip Guedalla, and Robert Barrington Ward, a future editor of The Times.
His descriptions of his fellow undergraduates were sometimes sharp – Clark, for example, was ‘clever, but knows it’. He also observed from afar the antics of the Old Etonians who have sometimes been thought of as embodying the ethos of Edwardian Oxford, but who were in fact a minority of the Balliol undergraduate body. More typical were fellows and students with a strong social conscience and political beliefs that were left of centre. Allen’s friends were for the most part serious-minded young men from commercial and professional families, with fathers who were manufacturers, schoolmasters, or clergymen.
One particularly fascinating aspect of the letters is the evolution of his views on what he called ‘the great issue’ of Home Rule.
Allen’s own paternal ancestors were by all accounts Cromwellian settlers in Ireland (though this family tradition is hard to verify). By the late-19th century they were solidly anchored in the Dublin Protestant middle class. His grandfather had been rector of St Audoen’s parish in the city; and his father was destined for a career as a clergyman or an academic at Trinity College Dublin before deciding to become a university administrator in Australia. One of Allen’s uncles was a barrister, two aunts had married barristers. Allen visited them all several times, and although his letters from Ireland make no reference to the feverish political climate in the run-up to the Home Rule crisis he was clearly ruminating on Irish politics.
One particularly fascinating aspect of the letters is the evolution of his views on what he called ‘the great issue’ of Home Rule. His father was a diehard Unionist, and at first Allen dutifully followed this example. But gradually he began to think for himself – his views became more liberal, if not Liberal, and, much to his father’s disgust, he eventually decided that Home Rule would be the best solution for Ireland, for Britain and for the Empire.
[The letters] offer wonderful insights into Edwardian life: as he listened to Keir Hardie and Millicent Fawcett speak at public meetings … watched Vaughan Williams conduct the newly written Sea Symphony, and the ageing Sarah Bernhardt perform on stage.
When these letters were written, Allen Leeper was still a young man, albeit slightly older than most of his fellow undergraduates, and with a broader perspective, deriving from his ‘colonial’ background. His letters reveal a developing character, slowly emancipating itself from the influence of his family.
They also offer wonderful insights into Edwardian life: as he listened to Keir Hardie and Millicent Fawcett speak at public meetings, attended tennis championships at Wimbledon, heard Paderewski give a piano recital, watched Vaughan Williams conduct the newly written Sea Symphony, and the ageing Sarah Bernhardt perform on stage, and eventually participated (as a member of the Oxford Officer Training Corps) in the ceremonies surrounding the funeral of King Edward VII.
They present a vivid picture of England, Ireland and Europe on the eve of the First World War, reflecting the mounting tensions in British politics and the looming war with Germany. They also contain glimpses of an emerging modernity: air-displays by aviation pioneers in France, for example, which Allen greeted with youthful enthusiasm, and the first manifestations of the Cubist movement in art, of which he was more sceptical. Taken as a whole they bring out the complexities as well as the colour of a critical period in British and world history.
About the Author
D.W. Hayton is emeritus professor of early modern British and Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast.
A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, his principal research interests lie in the political and religious history of Ireland and Britain in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and in twentieth-century historiography. He is the author of Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester, 2019).
David’s new Camden Series volume, Allen Leeper’s Letters Home, 1908–1912. An Irish-Australian at Edwardian Oxford (5th Series, Volume 67) is now available online from Cambridge University Press. David’s Introduction to the volume is currently available free.
Fellows and Members of the Society may also order copies of the hardback print edition of this volume will be published later in the year. Copies are available for £16 per volume; members wishing to do so should contact administration@royalhistsoc.org, marking their email ‘Camden’.
About the RHS Camden Series
The Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series is one of the most prestigious and important collections of primary source material relating to British History, including the British empire and Britons’ influence overseas.
The Society (and its predecessor, the Camden Society) has since 1838 published scholarly editions of sources — making important, previously unpublished, texts available to researchers. Each volume is edited by a specialist historian who provides an expert introduction and commentary.
Today the Society publishes two new Camden volumes each year in association with Cambridge University Press. The complete Camden Series now comprises over 380 volumes of primary source material, ranging from the early medieval to late-twentieth century Britain.
HEADER IMAGE: Balliol College Freshmen, 1908. Copyright Gillman and Soame. Balliol College Library, R.G. Waddy photograph album. Allen Leeper, top row second from left.