William Travers Symons (1879–1976)[1][2] was an English Social Credit and Christian Socialist writer, known as a member of the Chandos Group and journal editor.
[14] At this period Symons joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and was on good terms with Keir Hardie.
[15] Orage, Symons and Charles Marshall Hattersley, three journalists, were considered the major British publicists of Social Credit ideas.
[16] Maurice Reckitt met Symons at the "big [i.e. Swanage] social credit conference" in 1921.
Labour set up a committee to look at it, in 1922; Orage and Social Credit's founder C. H. Douglas refused to deal with it.
[19] In October of that year, Orage left the country, and spent the rest of the decade working for the Gurdjieff Foundation.
[20] With the Labour Party in power a few years later, Symons was on the Finance Inquiry set up by the ILP National Council, and in 1925 dissented, with James Maxton, from its first report.
[21] At the May 1926 meeting convened by Dimitrije Mitrinović, which founded the Chandos Group, Symons was one of those present.
[25] He and Reckitt were among the seven authors of Coal: A Challenge to the National Conscience, (1927), an early product of the Group, published by the Hogarth Press.
[32] That year, in reply to prompting from Symons, C. H. Douglas set up an official Social Credit Secretariat.
[31] In 1934 Orage died, and the Chandos Group set up a committee to find an editor for his New English Weekly.