Guy Harrison


Guy Harrison is an elusive figure. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and in the 1920s had been Honorary Treasurer of the British Record Society, but he published little and is hard to find in the obvious sources for antiquarianism and local history in the period. It is still not known where he was educated or quite how he spent his early adult life, except that as a young man he lived in Bloomsbury in 1907–8, near Charing Cross in 1914, and at Ruislip in 1924–6. Despite owning a fine collection of books on the history of Kent, for example, he was never a member of the Kent Archaeological Society. Typical of his reticence is the fact that he insisted on corresponding with the IHR through the Mail Department of the American Express Company in London. Before the Second World War, his letters are formal and rather stilted, the only personal touch an occasional remark about the weather; later he opened up a little, going so far as to address the war-time Acting Librarian Esmond de Beer as ‘Dear de Beer’, but retaining the formality of ‘Dear Director’ when he wrote to Goronwy Edwards in the 1950s. For all that, anyone who has made use of his books and knows something about him cannot help but warm to the man; and the more one looks into his life, the more intriguing he becomes.

Guy Harrison’s father Thomas, remarkably enough, was from a working-class family in rural Northumberland, in a family of four brought up by a widowed father; he escaped the life available to his older brother, labourer in a coke works, by somehow winning a place as a student at the Wesleyan Methodist divinity college at Didsbury near Manchester, and was posted as a minister on the Wesleyan circuits before becoming an Anglican clergyman when Guy was little. Even more astonishingly, given Thomas’s background, he married a daughter of the wealthy industrialist Heber Mardon, of the Bristol company Mardon, Son & Hall, printers to the tobacco industry and from 1901 part of the Imperial Tobacco conglomerate. Old Mr Mardon, Guy’s grandfather, died in 1925, leaving the immense fortune of £400,000 (by one measure equivalent to £140 million in current terms). By then Guy’s father had retired to Sevenoaks, having served parishes in rural Kent until Guy was about thirteen, industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire throughout his adolescence and early manhood, and at Margate from 1912.

Guy’s mother’s money offered him the possibility of pursuing interests in books and bibliography even before the Great War, producing in 1914 a most unexpected publication, a bibliography of the ‘decadent’ poet Ernest Dowson (d. 1900), member of the Rhymers’ Club at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street. It looks as if Guy Harrison went on a long journey in the decade that followed. In 1914 he was living in chambers in Villiers Street and associated in some as-yet unfathomable way with the outer ripples of a long-dispersed circle of writers and artists that had included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. By the mid 1920s he was resident in suburban Middlesex and nominated for the Society of Antiquaries by the most solidly respectable of gentlemen scholars, headed by Sir Henry Burke, Garter King of Arms. Was there some transformative experience during the Great War? As things stand the question cannot be answered.

Part of the reason why Guy has been so hard to pin down is that after 1926 there is no home address for him. By the later 1930s he was living in hotels, another change of life from Ruislip, moving regularly between Brussels, Rouen, and London over the course of each year, worrying about the weather and carefully packing books ahead of each journey. His father’s death at the end of 1935 may have made the accumulation of books at Sevenoaks a pressing matter for a man who had set his face against any conventionally rooted domestic life; at any rate Guy was in touch with the IHR at precisely that moment.






By Chris Lewis (IHR/KCL)