\"English Historian\" Arthur Bryant Hand Written Letter Dated 1949 For Sale

Up for sale "English Historian" Arthur Bryant Hand Written Letter Dated 1949. 

ES-4676E

Sir

Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE (18

February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London

News and man of affairs. His books included studies

of Samuel Pepys, accounts of

English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined

somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of

detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his

works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime

ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson. Bryant's historiography was often based on an

English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealised

agrarian past. He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he

emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of

"fools" and "knaves". Arthur

Bryant was the son of Sir Francis Morgan Bryant, who was the chief clerk to

the Prince of Wales, and wife

Margaret (May) née Edmunds. His father would later hold a number of offices in

the royal secretariat, eventually becoming registrar of the Royal Victorian Order.

Arthur grew up in a house bordering the Buckingham Palace gardens near the Royal Mews. There he developed a feel for the trappings of

traditional British protocol and a strong attachment to the history of England. He

attended school at Pelham House, Sandgate, and Harrow School where his younger brother the Rev. Philip

Henry Bryant later became an assistant Master. Though he expected to join

the British Army, he won in

1916 a scholarship to Pembroke College,

Cambridge. Despite that, he joined the Royal Flying Corps the

following year, as a pilot officer.[2] While there, he served in the first squadron to

bomb the towns of the Rhineland during World War 1. He was also for a time the only British subject

formally attached to the United States' Expeditionary Force's Air Service, to one of

its detachments that had arrived in England for training for frontline service. In

1919 he read Modern History at Queen's College, Oxford,

obtaining distinction in the honours courses offered to ex-servicemen in 1920. Bryant

started work at a school operated by the London County Council,

where he developed a strong sense of social justice and became convinced that

education would be an effective way of uniting the people. That conviction led

him to become a historian. Tall, dark, and attractive, he was popular at

the debutante balls he

regularly attended, where he often persuaded his dancing partners to help him

teach some of the less fortunate children at a children's library he had

established in Charles Dickens's old

house in Somers Town, London. He

became a barrister at the Inner Temple in 1923, but left later that year to take the headmaster position of the

Cambridge School of Arts, Crafts, and Technology, becoming the youngest

headmaster in England. He organised the Cambridge Pageant in 1924 and the

Oxford Pageant in 1926. Altogether, he proved remarkably successful in

enrolling students, the school growing from three hundred to two thousand

students in his three years there.[3] During 1926 he married Sylvia Mary Shakerley,

daughter of Walter Geoffrey Shakerley, the third Baronet Shakerley, and the

following year became a lecturer in history for the Oxford University delegacy

for extramural studies, a position he retained until 1936. His marriage was

dissolved in 1930. He also served as an advisor at the Bonar Law College

at Ashridge. His first

book, The Spirit of Conservatism, appeared in 1929 and was written

with his former students in mind.