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arthur calder-Marshall
A magic Steyning youth
Arthur Calder-Marshall was born on 19th Aug<strong>us</strong>t,
1908 at ‘El Misti’, Woodcote Road, Wallington,
Surrey. It was on this road, incidentally, that
Mervyn Peake’s father set up as a general
practitioner when he brought his family home
from China. The experimental, left-leaning
novels that Calder-Marshall wrote were once
highly regarded. Now he is probably best k<strong>now</strong>n
for being the father of the actress Anna Calder-
Marshall. About Levy (1933) is the story of a
sympathetic Jewish doctor, acc<strong>us</strong>ed of murder.
Dead Centre (1935) <strong>us</strong>es no fewer than sixtyseven
different narrators to tell a story that draws
on the author’s own experiences teaching at a
minor public school. One of the teachers in the
novel exclaims, “It’s wrong to blame the Public
Schools for what is actually the nature of boys.”
Calder-Marshall’s misgivings about private
education were given a further airing in
Challenge to Schools, a pamphlet published by
the Hogarth Press. In an article published in the
New Statesman and Nation in February 1941, he
coined the phrase ‘The Pink Decade’ to describe
the 1930s. Once employed in Hollywood as a
scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, during
the war Calder-Marshall joined the film division
of the Ministry of Information. An admiring
depiction of Calder-Marshall at this time appears
in Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-
Ross. After the war he wrote books on subjects as
diverse as Havelock Ellis and the salacio<strong>us</strong> picture
postcards of Donald McGill. He edited selections
of the writings of Jack London, Tom Paine and
George R Sims. The last named was author of It
was Christmas Day in the Workho<strong>us</strong>e and one of
the many candidates for Jack the Ripper.
Calder-Marshall’s life changed when
commissioned to write a life of Vice-Admiral
w w w. V I VA l E w E s . C o M
l I t E r A r y s U s s E x
Riall Wadham Woods. While serving as a signals
officer at the Battle of Jutland, Woods allegedly
received an ‘interposed message’ amongst other
Morse code traffic, instructing him to serve God.
He later took Holy Orders and worked as a
padre in a Whitechapel seaman’s hostel. During
his research Calder-Marshall became convinced
that Woods was praying for him from heaven,
and the book, No Earthly Command, became
partly biography and partly the story of Calder-
Marshall’s own conversion to Christianity.
Steyning is Calder-Marshall’s connection with
S<strong>us</strong>sex. The town is probably best k<strong>now</strong>n for
its tradition of treating whooping cough with
donkey-hair sandwiches, a cure <strong>now</strong> largely
discredited. Arthur moved there with his family
at the age of fifteen. His grandfather wrote a
poem entitled A Reverie at Steyning, which
began, ‘I see the roofs of dear old Steyning/
Quaint old-fashioned market town./ Some are
roofed with S<strong>us</strong>sex limestone,/Some are red, and
some are brown.’ Printed at his own expense, it
retailed for the modest sum of threepence with
all proceeds going to the Church Lads’ Brigade.
Arthur was befriended by the oddball proprietor
of Steyning’s Vine Press, Victor Neuburg. He was
a former associate of Aleister Crowley who, it was
rumoured, had once transformed Neuburg into
a zebra. Calder-Marshall’s memoir, The Magic
of My Youth (1951) not only tells the story of his
own later involvement with Crowley but is also a
delightful evocation of S<strong>us</strong>sex in the 1920s.
David Jarman. This article is dedicated to
the memory of John Grover (1917-1997) who
introduced me to The Magic of My Youth.
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