Leslie Paul

Life

Born in Dublin in April 1905, Leslie Paul grew up in South East London. After World War I he became deeply involved with scouting and related youth movements.

He left the Scouts to join the Kibbo Kift Kindred but after a dispute with the Kibbo Kift leader, John Hargrave in 1925, some south London co-operative groups challenged Hargrave's authoritarian tendencies. The dispute was over his refusal to recognise a local group called "The Brockley Thing". The result was a split, and a group, including Paul, broke away from the Kindred, to form the Woodcraft Folk which is still active. Paul was appointed leader of the Woodcraft Folk and later came to be identified as its founder. Although in fact the organisation was the work of a number of people, Paul was its most eloquent member and was usually called upon to represent it to outside bodies. Paul's political views were inspired by H. G. Wells, William Morris,and Edward Carpenter, while his ideas about children's education were partly drawn from Rousseau's Emile. In addition, Paul was also active in the pacifist No More War Movement. Paul was an outspoken critic of the Axis powers, as well as the Soviet Union following the latter nation's signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. After the outbreak of World War Two, Paul abandoned his pacifism and supported the British war effort.

After the Second World War Paul became an active member of the Church of England, leading to his moving away from the radically orientated Woodcraft Folk, and later a professional clergyman. His most significant act within the Church was the production of the Paul Report into the payment of the clergy, which led to extensive modernisation of the Church's organisational structure.

During the 1980s Paul was writer in residence at the College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham, occupying a basement flat in Shurdington Road. As well as mentoring young college and local Writers, Paul gave a series of talks on his life and the books that had affected him most profoundly. These included:

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, a novel Paul read annually. He claimed to have read every Dickens novel by the age of ten.

Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurides Brigge. Rilke's Duino Elegies were to have a profound effect on Paul's own poetry and thinking.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago - which Paul considered a if not the major novel of the twentieth century, resonating with his own visit to Moscow in 1931.

Novels of Henry Williamson. Williamson writing a series of experimental, far from successful, but extremely interesting and unfairly neglected novels.

Paul also recalled his friendship and support derived from T S Eliot, fiercely disputing claims of Eliot's sympathies with fascism. Paul was proud to consider himself a surviving contemporary of Thomas Hardy.

Works

"The Folk Trail" Woodcraft Folk leaders manual. ?1928

"The Annihilation of Man" (1945?)

In 1951 he wrote an autobiography called Angry Young Man. The title subsequently became the catchphrase "angry young men" used to describe a generation of British writers, including Kingsley Amis, Colin Wilson and (over-broadly) applied to authors of the "kitchen sink dramas".

"The Boy Down Kitchener Street" (Faber & Faber, 1957) a novel based on Leslie's childhood in London.

"O PIoneers" (1978) poetry inspired by time spent in America

"Bulgarian Horse" (1978) Cold War thriller.

"The Early Days of the Woodcraft Folk" historical pamphlet (undated, believed written between 1975 and 1980)

"Heron Lake" - diary of a year spent in the Norfolk countryside.

"The Waters and the Wild" 1975. A novel set during the Second World War about two young boys in an East Anglian village. The story revolves around their use of a lake and island near their home, their attempts to capture a large pike and their relationships with each other and their families.