The Godfather: Peter Corris on Bertrand Russell

Tags: Bertrand Russell/ Bloomsbury Group/ Fabian Society/ Nobel Prize/ the ABC/ the BBC/ Woodrow Wyatt

In a book I was reading recently I came across a mention of Bertrand Russell as convenor of a conference of intellectuals and others protesting against the war in Vietnam. Russell was then 94. I hadn’t thought about him for years, but was abruptly reminded of what a formative influence he had been in my youth.

This wasn’t on account of his brilliant work as a mathematician, logician and philosopher, of which I wouldn’t have understood a thing. He influenced me as a writer (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950). His views on religion and social and political conservatism also helped to shape my own atheism and political beliefs.

Russell’s collection Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (1957) was given to me by my sister for my 15th birthday. I read it often and still have it.

Pacifism and anti-imperialism in World War I, ardent support for female suffrage and sexual freedom, participation in campaigns for nuclear disarmament and opposition to the immoral and doomed American enterprise in South-East Asia, made Russell a hero in many eyes, including mine.

Born to wealth and privilege in an aristocratic family that was liberal in politics and also artistic, Russell distinguished himself at Cambridge. But his pacifism in World War I and radical social and political opinions took him in a different direction. A member of the Bloomsbury Group – Fabians and free-thinkers – Russell’s life was a series of head-buttings against orthodoxy and authority.

As has become apparent from later memoirs of contemporaries, biographies of others and novels loosely based on the Trinity ‘aesthetes’ and the Bloomsbury Group, Russell had a tempestuous sexual career, during which he treated some women badly. Despite his diminutive size and halitosis, he was attractive to women, whom he pursued energetically.

A BBC television series entitled Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind was shown on ABC TV in the 1960s and I watched it avidly. Russell, in his 80s, shrivelled but still mischievous, was interviewed by Woodrow Wyatt, a bow-tie-wearing broadcaster who could not sound his r’s. ‘Tell me, Lord Wussell …’ he would begin and I marvelled at the old man’s wit and wisdom.

In 1961 Russell was imprisoned for a week in Brixton Prison for breach of the peace after his participation in an anti-nuclear demonstration. For years I treasured a clipping of a cartoon that had appeared in one of the English papers. It showed a hole smashed in the prison wall and four prisoners, in the appropriate striped suits, lined up in front of a prison guard. Three of the prisoners are huge knuckle-draggers and the other is tiny, 89-year-old Russell with his shock of white hair and his characteristic whimsical expression.

‘All right,’ says the baton-wielding guard. ‘Who’s the brains behind this?’

I wish I’d preserved the clipping more carefully.

Russell died in 1970 at the age of 98. The girlfriend I had at the time was a philosophy academic. She wept at the news. I didn’t weep, but I knew that someone uniquely and courageously clear-minded had left the scene.

Russell said, ‘Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.’ I would put that on my tombstone except that, sensibly, like Russell, I’d elect to be cremated.