John Langdon-Davies
[1] Author of books on military, scientific, historical and Spanish subjects, Langdon-Davies has been described as "an accomplished war correspondent" and "a brilliant populariser of science and technology".
According to one critic, it showed "all the young poet's faults";[3] to another, "Mr Langdon-Davies's verse owes nothing to the transient excitements of the hour",[4] referring to the fact that it was not influenced by war fever.
The Times Literary Supplement said it was "the outcome of a brooding imagination intensely affected by open-air influences ... and expressing itself with a real sense of style".
He also made his first visit to Catalonia, after which, in 1921, he and Connie, with their two small sons, settled for more than two years in the Pyrenean village of Ripoll, where he met groups of left-wing intellectuals and Catalan nationalists.
Here, reading a lot of poetry and much influenced by Arthur Waley's translations of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, he wrote a small book of verse, Man on Mountain, which was printed in Ripoll and published by Birrell and Garnett in 1922.
The Daily News sent him to Barcelona in 1923 to report on the coup d'état by Miguel Primo de Rivera, which he evaluated as comparable to the Irish question.
[6] In it, he attacked the pseudoscientists whose books were so popular in the US, particularly advocates of racial superiority, such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whom Langdon-Davies described as "Race Fiends".
Most of the 60 or more published reviewers of The New Age of Faith were in agreement with John Bakeless, who wrote that "rarely has popular science been written with such spicy impertinence, such gay insouciance, or with so much intelligence and such scrupulous regard for facts...".
Twenty years later the Catalan writer Josep Pla said that it was the best book ever published on the sardana: "With the exception of the poetry of Joan Maragall, there is nothing in our language comparable with this essay".
In it Langdon-Davies traced the development of the idea of Woman from the primitive taboo, the Christian fear, worship of fertility, etc., which was now to be reshaped by the new knowledge.
[1] Langdon-Davies welcomed the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, describing it as a "good-tempered revolution" that marked "a real break with the past" and which would deliver freedom to Catalonia.
The following year he wrote Behind the Spanish Barricades, in which he recorded the exuberance of the short-lived proletarian revolution in Barcelona and also reported on the horrors of war as he visited Toledo during the siege of the Alcázar.
[1] On the other hand, Langdon-Davies disapproved of the activities of the Catalan party POUM, which he felt were undermining the Republican war effort, and that was reflected in his coverage.
[20] His biography of Charles II of Spain, Carlos: The King who would Not Die was praised by the journal Hispania, which stated, "The events of this history are recounted with a fine evocative power supported by impressive research".
[22] Plan International, the children's charity Langdon-Davies co-founded, now works in 50 of the world's poorest countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
