Esmé Cecil Wingfield-Stratford


Esmé Cecil Wingfield-Stratford was an English historian, writer, mind-trainer, outdoorsman, patriot and ruralist.

Life

Esmé was born on 20 September 1882 elder son of Brigadier-General Cecil Wingfield-Stratford and his wife, Rosalind Isabel, daughter of the Revd Hon. Edward Vesey Bligh and Lady Isabel Bligh. Unhappy at Eton College, it was at King's College, Cambridge where he really developed, matriculating in 1900. This was followed by a research studentship at the London School of Economics. His work at the LSE on what became the first volume of his History of British Patriotism led to his election in 1907 to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, which he retained until 1913. In the same year he was awarded the degree of DScEcon by the University of London. In 1915 he married Barbara Elizabeth, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel H. L. Errington and the Hon. Mrs Errington. After war service in India, Wingfield-Stratford sought no further academic advancement, instead settling down to a very productive life as historian and author, dividing his time between his rural home at Berkhamsted and London, where he could follow his many interests in the theatre, music and the arts. He also developed a taste for foreign travel. He married Barbara Elizabeth Errington on 30 December 1915, and on 9 Nov 1916 had a daughter, Roshnara Barbara Wingfield-Stratford

Work

Wingfield-Stratford's first substantial work was The History of English Patriotism, a theme to which he several times returned. The most lasting of his books remains The History of British Civilization which stands comparison with the better-known one-volume histories of England by G. M. Trevelyan and Keith Feiling. Trevelyan was one of a number of professional historians, which also included R. H. Tawney and John and Barbara Hammond, who were his neighbours in the country and provided companions for long walks during which historical issues provided the staple of conversation. Whether writing of the seventeenth or the nineteenth centuries or the Middle Ages, Wingfield-Stratford treated figures of the past as though he had known them individually. His particular approach to history treated the real-world, physical evidence of landscape and buildings as no less significant than archives and literature. When he published his last book, Beyond Empire, in 1964 he could point to about forty volumes bearing his name, including—besides histories—polemical works, fiction, and poetry. Routledge was his chief publisher.

Character

"he was all of a piece, his physical build which was wonderfully large and expansive, his high ambitions and boisterous enthusiasms which were on the same gargantuan scale, even his fierce prejudices which lay scattered like rolled-up hedgehogs along the paths of his conversation."
- Peter Quennell, letter to The Times, 27 Feb 1971
An especially passionate country walker, outdoorsman and amateur cricketer, his unconventional dress and lilting upper-class voice made him something of an oddity. Though he embraced innovation and modernism in the arts, his great love was for the rural England and London of his youth, forever destroyed by the first world war. The political and social consequences of progress and technology were realities that made him uneasy, and he was a man of tender nostalgia for his own Merry England. In spite of the "aggressiveness of temper and the somewhat rhetorical extravagance of mind" mentioned in his obituary from The Times, he was loved and respected by all who knew him, as was his larger-than-life, eccentric personality.

Death

Wingfield-Stratford died of heart failure on 20 February 1971 at his home in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire at the age of 89. He was survived by his wife and their daughter, Roshnara Barbara Wingfield-Stratford.

Selected books