Derek Savage (Christian anarchist)


Derek Stanley Savage was an English Christian anarchist, a pacifist poet and critic. British historian David Goodway described him as 'one of the most highly regarded literary critics of the 1940s'. He was General Secretary of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship from 1960 to 1962.

Life

Savage was born in Essex and brought up in Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. He went to Hertford Grammar School and the Latymer School, Edmonton and then a commercial college. He became a convinced Christian pacifist. In 1938 he married Constance Kiernan. They had six children.
In the Second World War a tribunal accepted his conscientious objection to conscription. In a letter written in 1942, he informed George Orwell that Hitler required "not condemnation, but understanding". In 1947 the family moved to Cornwall, initially to a dilapidated cottage in the Heligan Woods and then into the village of Mevagissey. Savage died in 2007, aged 90.

Writing and literary activities

Savage wrote under the name of D.S. Savage. According to Trevor Tolley he was associated with the following 'leftist' writers in the 1940s: George Woodcock, Alex Comfort, J. F. Hendry, Norman McCaig, Derek Stanford. In Cornwall, his associates included Louis Adeane, Dick Kitto, Mary Lee Settle, W. S. Graham, Nessie Dunsmuir, Frank Baker, Lionel Miskin and Bernie Moss.
He contributed many articles, reviews and poems to magazines such as Twentieth Century Verse, Life and letters today and The Phoenix, of which he became European Editor, in succession to Henry Miller. From Mevagissey he contributed many book reviews for The Spectator and Time and Tide.
His 1944 book The Personal Principle: Studies in modern poetry gave his strong views on contemporary poetry. His controversial critical book The Withered Branch attacked the twentieth-century novels of Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Margiad Evans, Aldous Huxley and James Joyce. His last book of poetry, Winter offering: selected poems 1934–1953, was issued by the Leavisite Brynmill Press in 1990.

Selected publications

Articles

1940s

Books

The Autumn World. Poems. With a black and white portrait by Richard Seddon. London, Fortune Press, 1939.Don Quixote, and other poems, London, Right Review, 1939.A Time to mourn. Poems, 1934–1943. London, Routledge. 1943The Personal Principle: Studies in modern poetry, London, Routledge, 1944.Hamlet & the Pirates: An exercise in literary detection, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950.The Withered Branch: Six studies in the modern novel. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950.The cottager's companion, London, Peter Davies, 1975. and paperback edition, London, Mayflower, 1980..Self-Sufficient Country Living, New York, St Martins Press, 1978, .And also much cattle : scenario for four voices, London, Brentham Press, 1975. and, 1993 Harleston, Brynmill Press.. Winter offering : selected poems 1934–1953, Gringley-on-the-Hill, S. Yorks., Brynmill, c.1990.. Edition of 190 copies.

Lyrics of musical works by John Douglas Turner

Dirtying My Thing, c 1970Your Mother Thinks I’m a Hoodlum, c 1970