Alaric Jacob

Harold Alaric Jacob (8 June 1909-26 January 1995) was an English writer and Journalist, most active in the period 1940-1960.

Early life

Jacob was the son of Harold Fenton Jacob who was in the Indian Civil Service and at one time Political Agent in Aden. His mother was the daughter of a Danish missionary and he was born at Edinburgh as a matter of circumstance. As a child he spent time in India and Arabia but was educated in England at St Cyprian's School Eastbourne and The King's School, Canterbury. He was unimpressed with the standard of teaching at his public school and predicted that he was unlikely to achieve a scholarship to university. Realising he was a skilful writer, he decided to become a journalist. With the encouragement of his father, who was challenged by the expense of his school fees, he left school and went to Paris.

Journalist career

When he was 17 he wrote a play, "The Compleat Cynic" which was produced at Plymouth where he started his career as a journalist on the Western Morning News. At 21 he published his first novel "Seventeen" a fictionalised account of his schooldays in Canterbury. He was introduced to Sir Roderick Jones, the head of Reuters and was offered a position as diplomatic correspondent in London.

During his time in London, with his charm and wit, Jacob moved in high social and intellectual circles. In 1934, he married Iris Morley, daughter of Lieut-Col Chartres Morley. [ [http://www.geocities.com/myjacobfamily/nassau.html NASSAU ANCESTORS] ] She was a historical novelist and journalist for The Observer and the Yorkshire Post. This was at the time of the economic depression and the Jarrow March and these stirred up socialist sentiments in the couple. In 1936 the Jacob's went to Washington where as a foreign correspondent he was a regular and close contact with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Jacob's stayed in Washington until the outbreak of the World War II, when they returned to London.

War correspondent

Jacob was in London until 1941 and then spent two years with the 8th Army in North Africa. After the first and second Battle of El Alamein, he went to India where he covered Wingate's first 'Chindit' expedition and then to Russia as a war correspondent for the Daily Express. [Alaric Jacob A Traveller's War Collins 1944] He was attached to the Red Army from the Battle of Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin and became sympathetic towards the soviet regime. [Alaric Jacob A Window in Moscow Collins 1946] He stayed in the Soviet Union, on and off, until the start of the cold war in late 1947. He then joined the BBC at the monitoring station at Caversham but his career and pension rights were threatened because George Orwell, icon of the left and who had been at the same prep school, had included him on a blacklist of suspected Communists. [ [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jun/21/books.artsandhumanities The Guardian John Ezard "Blair's babe Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge?" Saturday June 21 2003] ] Jacob ended up as a senior editor at Bush House when he retired in 1972.

Family

His wife Iris had become a Communist and her ideas strongly influenced him. He suspected that her membership of the Communist Party worked against him even when they were separated. [ [http://www.bilderberg.org/mi5bbc.htm Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor "Blacklist:The Inside Story of Political Vetting" The Hogarth Press LONDON 1988 ISBN 0 7012 0811 2] ] When she died in 1953 he married again to the British actress Kathleen Byron. He had a daughter by his first wife and a son and daughter by his second wife.

Paul Hogarth described Alaric Jacob as the quintessential English journalist; urbane, yet modest, with a bone-dry sense of humour and a razor intelligence. "He possessed the grand manner of an Edwardian foreign correspondent with an Alan-Clark-like taste for vintage claret, a good cigar and fine brandy". [ [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19950208/ai_n13965625 The Independent(London), Richard Jones and Paul Hogarth Obituary - Alaric Jacob Feb 8, 1995] ]

Publications

* "Seventeen" (1930)
* "A Traveller's War" (1944)
* "A Window in Moscow" (1946)
* "Scenes from a Bourgeois Life" (1949)
* "Two Ways in the World" (1962)
* "A Russian Journey"
* "Eminent Nonentities"

"Scenes from a Bourgeois Life"

In 1949, Jacob published "Scenes from a Bourgeois Life", an autobiographical novel and an apologia for the paradoxes and anomalies of his career. He describes his family as having devoted itself selflessly to serving the church and empire and shows his contempt for the pursuit of wealth through industrial capitalism. He disapproves the displacement of the old order by the "nouveaux riches".

The book is written with a wry humour, and with Dickensian names lightly disguising the real people he knew.

References