Richard Rumbold of 'Little Victims' Fame: 2018

Richard Rumbold ( 1913-1961), Author, rebel and thinker

A short tribute by William Cross, FSA Scot

Richard Rumbold was born on 24 June 1913, the second of the three children of Charles Edmund Arden Law Rumbold (1872–1943), an army officer, and Anne Christian (1881–1928). There was an elder brother who died at birth and he had a sister, Rosemary, three years younger, who pre-deceased him.

Richard’s bullying father Charles is at the centre of his autobiographical book ‘My Father's Son’ (1947), published under the pseudonym Richard Lumford, the book is a harrowing account of Richard’s unhappy childhood.

To add to the gloom Richard’s mother, Anne, committed suicide.

According to Richard’s entry in the ODNB by his friend Raleigh Trevelyan ( 1923-2014) ( text used in part below):

Richard Rumbold in front ( left) with Richard Aldington

“ Rumbold was handsome and physically well built, with blue eyes. His father attacked him constantly for 'effeminacy', and regarded intellectuals as 'half-baked'.

Richard attended various schools, in England, France, and

Germany

. For a while, to 'knock out the softness', he was a cadet on a naval training ship, another unhappy experience.

Richard went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he revived and ran a literary club, arranging talks by such personalities as Lord Alfred Douglas, Frieda Lawrence and W. B. Yeats.

Brought up as a Roman Catholic, in 1933 Richard created a storm when he published a novel, ‘Little Victims’. The book hit hard at the Catholic Church, his parents, public-school homosexuality, and Oxford aesthetes. As a result he was refused the sacrament by the university chaplain, Father Ronald Knox.

Richard was diagnosed with tuberculosis and left Oxford without taking a degree in 1934. He travelled a great deal and on a cruise met a well-off American, Hilda Byrne Young, who for much of his life acted as a doting substitute mother,

During the Second World War Richard was a private in the Royal Army Service Corps, but soon transferred to the Royal Air Force. He was exhilarated by the experience of his training as a pilot, not only the flying but the sense of comradeship.

Again as per the ODNB [Richard had a] “deeply serious, longing for the true love he could never achieve.” He began treatment for schizophrenia and edited a collection of Flaubert's letters in 1950... “He took up riding a motorcycle, at tremendous speeds. His ecstatic discovery of flying led to a biography of Saint-Exupéry, ‘The Winged Life’ (1953), written in collaboration with Lady Margaret Stewart.

Hilda Young accompanied Richard to Ceylon, where he hoped to find 'sensual liberation and spiritual reconciliation'. His interest in Buddhism took him to

Japan

, where he was a part-time postulant in a Zen monastery.

In the 1960s Rumbold went to Sicily, accompanied by Hilda Young. On 10 March 1961, at a hotel in Palermo, while Hilda Young was typing in another room, Rumbold fell from a window, and died. Accident v Suicide?

Richard Rumbold is buried in the graveyard of the Anglican Church of Watton-on-Stone in Hertfordshire.

“ [An] idealist, ceaselessly searching for a faith for his idealism, and for inner peace'.

Extracts from his diaries, with some meditations on Zen, were edited and published by his cousin, the poet, William Plomer in ‘ A Message in Code’ (1964).

Anecdotes about Richard Rumbold feature in the books of several literary figures including Harold Nicolson, Cecil Roberts, James Lees-Milne and Robin Bryans. Evan Morgan’s biographer William Cross has a chapter on Rumbold and his overlaps with Evan Morgan in the book “ Not Behind Lace Curtains, The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar” ( 2013).