Stewart Farrar

A devout communist in early life, he worked as a reporter for such newspapers as the Soviet Weekly and the Daily Worker, and also served in the British army during the Second World War.

After being initiated into Alexandrian Wicca by Maxine Sanders in 1970,[1] he subsequently published one of the earliest books to describe this newly burgeoning religion, What Witches Do (1971).

Because of his work in propagating the Craft, the historian Ronald Hutton compared him to Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders as "the third and last of the great male figures who have formed Wicca".

[3] Stewart Farrar was born at his family home of 239 Winchester Road, Highams Park, Essex during the First World War, and as such his father was away serving in the British army, stationed in Salonika in Greece.

The Farrar family had already been somewhat successful, with a number of them becoming somewhat culturally significant: the first words that had been broadcast by radio across the Atlantic, Guglielmo Marconi's "can you hear me, Picken?

It was here that he joined the Officer Training Corps, where he learned much about military strategy, but at the same time disapproved of militarism and began to sympathise with left wing politics that were at odds with his conservative upbringing.

[8] After he ended his university education in 1937, he spent three months as an exchange student in Dresden, Germany, where he became fluent in German and also developed an even greater hatred of National Socialism than he already held.

[10] When war broke out against Nazi Germany in 1939, he immediately volunteered for the British army, feeling that he could put his military training to good use to fight against fascism.

"[14] Despite his love for Hilke, who would die of food poisoning only a few years later, Farrar returned to England, where with his wife and son, he moved to Bedford, where she would bear him a second child, a daughter named Lindsay, in 1948.

Meanwhile, he began to have an affair with Rachael 'Rae' Kaplin, a Jewish teacher who worked as a youth organiser for the Communist Party, and eventually decided to leave his wife and children to move in and live with her.

However, upon his return to Britain, he began to split from the communist Soviet Union and its policies, particularly after he was shocked at the way that they violently dealt with the Hungarian Uprising in 1957.

[17] Disillusioned with the route that the communist powers were taking, and wanting nothing more to do with the Soviet Union and its allies in Britain, he took up a job working first for R.H. Radford, a public relations firm and then Associated British Pathé where he eventually rose to the position of documentary writer.

Another of Farrar's most significant works was a documentary series that he scripted entitled Journey of a Lifetime, in which he travelled to the Holy Land in the Middle East to research, and later experienced what he described as an almost spiritual experience while visiting the mediaeval city of Petra.

Farrar would also co-write a 90-minute screenplay entitled Pity About the Abbey with his friend, Sir John Betjeman, who would later be made Poet Laureate.

Feeling alone, he turned to his second wife, Jean Mackinlay, who herself had just recently divorced her second husband, and although she refused his offer of reigniting their relationship, they did once more become friends.

In 1968 he re-united with another former lover, Beth Donovan, and married her, but he would leave her in June 1969 when he met a new woman, Isabel Sutherland, and subsequently moved in with her and her daughter.

[24] Meanwhile, in 1968 he won a Writer's Guild Award for his six-part radio serial Watch the Wall my Darling, which was based upon the poem A Smuggler's Song by one of his favourite poets, Rudyard Kipling.

The book has been called "controversial" because of Farrar's assertion that Sanders should be "ranked above Gerald B. Gardner and alongside Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi in terms of magical achievement".

[30] The Farrars, with the support of Doreen Valiente, argued in the book that even though the publishing of this material broke their oath of secrecy, it was justified by the need to correct misinformation.

[30] Janet Farrar indicates that some of the rituals contained in the couple's books were actually written by them, this includes the Oak King/Holly King cycle which they researched from Robert Graves's The White Goddess.