Sir Arnold de Montmorency: protector of Contemporary Review

Contemporary Review, March, 2004 by Richard Mullen

CONTEMPORARY Review was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century and it still flourishes at the start of the twenty-first. To survive through three centuries and throughout decades of vastly different outlooks on life is a considerable achievement. Much of this is due to the talents of our contributors and the loyalty of our readers, but there are also a few stalwart individuals whose dedication ensured the continuance of the journal. No one has contributed more to this during the last half century than Sir Arnold de Montmorency who died last December at the tremendous age of 95.

Arnold was born in 1908 in those spacious days of Edwardian England and appropriately for him his birth came in the midst of a great reforming Liberal government. His father, a Cambridge-bred scholar, J. E. G. de Montmorency taught law at the University of London and was also a well known writer on the topics of the day, such as popular education. He also wrote books on learned topics such as Thomas a Kempis's famous spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ. Professor de Montmorency's writing was infused with his strong Liberalism. Arnold had an enduring pride in his father's achievements. Once when I mentioned how frequently land law comes into Trollope's novels, Arnold said: 'My father helped to draw up the reform of those laws.'

Arnold's mother Maud, a general's daughter, came from another gentry family, the de Havillands. The actress Olivia de Havilland was a cousin. His Christian name 'Arnold' was chosen as a tribute to Matthew Arnold. Yet it was his mother rather than his namesake to whom Arnold gave the credit for his own life-long interest in reading and the love of books. Sadly, he did not achieve his one goal of equalling his mother's feat in living to her hundredth year.

Like so many men of his generation, Arnold's life was moulded by great institutions. In his case there were three, starting with his public school, Westminster. He was pre-eminently a Londoner and other than his time at Cambridge and in the war, he spent virtually the whole of his active life in London. Thus it was appropriate that his school nestled in the shadows of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Indeed the School, which boasts Dryden, Wren, and Gibbon among its distinguished 'old boys', developed from a school at the medieval Abbey. The second great institution was his college, Peterhouse, Cambridge's oldest college which dates back to 1284. Peterhouse has a particularly distinguished record of great historians and Arnold was lucky to have Herbert Butterfield as his tutor. Sir Herbert Butterfield, eventually the Master of Peterhouse, was well known for his habit of questioning established views on history and he became a perennial influence. Butterfield, who was only a few years older than his pupil, shared many attitudes with the young Arnold, especially a belief in the role of ideas from history and the importance of Christianity.

Arnold eventually became the driving force in creating the Friends of Peterhouse to raise money for his old college. He saw long before the current debate over 'top up fees' that higher education had to look beyond the government for funds. Even when Peterhouse became a bastion of Conservatism in the Thatcher Era, Arnold continued to visit the college and tell even so formidable a Master as Hugh Trevor-Roper what he thought about various topics. The final great institution with which Arnold had a decades-long connection was the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court, that medieval foundation for the education of lawyers. Arnold had won a Harmsworth Law Prize at Cambridge which pointed to a glittering career in the Law. He was called to the Bar in 1932 and settled happily into the work of a barrister interrupted, of course, by the Second World War where he rose to the rank of Major having served in the Middle East, Italy and Yugoslavia. As a barrister, Arnold dealt with a wide variety of cases. He had a strong sense of justice: I recall his fury about one poor man who was being unjustly accused of indecent exposure because he had stumbled undressed from bed to close his curtains. Towards the end of his legal career Arnold served as chairman of an Industrial Tribunal at a particularly tense time in industrial relations. Arnold entertained--and at times entertained others with--the view that the quality of judges had not improved during his lifetime.

Always the Londoner, Arnold spent most of the week living in his rooms at the top of the Middle Temple. Well into his seventies, lean and fit, he would scorn the somewhat primitive lift and race up the stairs to his rooms. They were a curious combination of the elegant and the frayed with a collection of some fine eighteenth-century paintings and walls of books, but you had to watch carefully as you manoeuvred across dangling electrical cords. In many ways Arnold, even into old age, was like a character in a Thackeray novel such as Pendennis, living in the Temple surrounded by the law, but his real world was the world of books and literature.