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Harold Monro

About: 

Poet and Bookseller

Date of birth: 
14 Mar 1879
Secondary works: 

Hibberd, Dominic, ‘Monro, Harold Edward (1879–1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35071]

City of birth: 
Brussells
Country of birth: 
Belgium
Other names: 

Harold Edward Monro

Locations

Poetry Bookshop, Devonshire Street W1W 5DT
United Kingdom
51° 31' 11.46" N, 0° 8' 31.542" W
Poetry Bookshop, Great Russell Street WC1B 3PE
United Kingdom
51° 31' 19.8012" N, 0° 7' 37.3116" W
Date of death: 
16 Mar 1932
Location of death: 
Kent, England
Location: 

Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street, London (1912-26)

Poetry Bookshop, 38 Great Russell Street, London (1926-35)

Tags for Making Britain: 

Sasadhar Sinha

About: 

Sasadhar Sinha came to Britain to study for a BSc at the London School of Economics. He stayed on to complete a PhD at the same institution, returning to India shortly afterwards. On his return, Sinha failed to get a job because of the anti-government content of his journalism and lectures. Fearing arrest, he soon returned to Britain, where, in 1935, he opened the Bibliophile Bookshop at 16 Little Russell Street. The Ceylonese writer Alagu Subramaniam worked as Sinha’s assistant there, and the magazine Indian Writing, to which Sinha contributed regularly, was also based there. Indeed, the Bibliophile became known as a political meeting place for Indians.

As well as being prominent in anti-colonial and left-wing political circles in Britain, Sinha worked as an evening lecturer at Eltham Literary Institute and at Lewisham and Dulwich Literary Institute, lecturing on current affairs, Indian history, economics and political science. Along with several other South Asians during this period, he was a regular reader at the British Museum Reading Room where his reading matter was monitored by government officials who kept surveillance reports on politically active South Asians in Britain. He was married to Marthe Goldwyn, a teacher at Prendergast Girls’ School, Lewisham, and registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. By 1941, the Bibliophile was running out of funds and Sinha began to incur debts. He sold the bookshop in 1942 - to either Krishna Menon or one Robert Scott Cleminson - but remained its manager. In 1945, he returned to India to take ‘an active part in the nationalist movement in Bengal’ (L/PJ/12/467, p. 17).

Published works: 

Indian Independence and the Congress (London: Swaraj House, 1943) [booklet]

Why Famine in India (London: Swaraj House, 1943) [booklet]

Indian Independence in Perspective (London: Asia Publishing House, 1965)

Example: 

L/PJ/12/467, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras, p. 7

Date of birth: 
01 Jan 1901
Content: 

This file contains surveillance reports on Sasadhar Sinha dating from just before his return to England in 1933 to his departure for India in 1945. They document his occupations, his political activities, and his associations with other South Asians in Britain.

Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Surat Alley, Mulk Raj Anand, Dr Vera Anstey (LSE), Kanwar Muhammad Ashraf, Sudhamay Basu, Dr K. C. Bhattacharyya (Sinha worked briefly as his secretary), Ray Choudhury, Sudhir Mohan Dutt, Professor Ginsberg (LSE), Marthe Goldwyn, Dulip Kumar Gupta, Agatha Harrison, Niharendu Datta Mazumdar, Krishna Menon, Ardesher Phirozsha Petigura, B. C. Sen, K. S. Shelvankar, Alagu Subramaniam, Gajindra Hiralal Thakore.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Indian Writing (regular contributor)

Precise DOB unknown: 
Y
Extract: 

Sinha…is still the proprietor of the Bibliophile Book Shop…From observation kept on this shop, it would seem to be primarily a rendezvous for Indians. On several occasions recently, particularly in the afternoons, as many as twenty-five Indian men and women have been seen to enter and remain on the premises for some considerable time. When leaving none of them appeared to have purchased any of the various extremist books and pamphlets displayed for sale in the window.

Secondary works: 

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)

Relevance: 

Of particular interest is Sinha’s establishment of the Bibliophile Bookshop in 1935. This is evidence of the presence of South Asians in Bloomsbury, the heart of London and its literary scene, during this early period of migration. The bookshop’s role as meeting place for politically active South Asian writers, as well as the content of the editorials of Indian Writing and Sinha’s involvement in numerous political organizations, are suggestive of the way in which Sinha, and many of his fellow writers, viewed literature and political commitment as closely linked, in contrast to a belief in ‘art for art’s sake’. The level and detail of the surveillance kept on Sinha is also striking: of particular note in this respect is evidence that the political content of Sinha’s choice of reading matter at the British Museum was monitored.

Archive source: 

L/PJ/12/467, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

Involved in events: 

India League meetings

City of birth: 
Santini, Ketan, Bengal
Country of birth: 
India

Locations

London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
51° 30' 50.1948" N, 0° 6' 59.6736" W
Bibliophile Bookshop
16 Russell Street
London, WC2B 5HF
United Kingdom
51° 30' 45.6336" N, 0° 7' 16.1472" W
Date of death: 
01 Jan 1972
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1925
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1925-32, 1933-45

Meary James Tambimuttu

About: 

A Sri Lankan Tamil from an affluent English-speaking Roman Catholic family, M. J. Tambimuttu arrived in Britain at the age of 22. Having already published three volumes of poetry in Ceylon, he soon immersed himself in the literary world of London’s Soho and Fitzrovia. Within little more than a year of his arrival he had founded the magazine Poetry London (1939–51) with the writer and musician Anthony Dickins. While Dickins' involvement quickly diminished, Tambimuttu edited the first fourteen volumes of the magazine and a number of books, as well as writing his own poetry. In July 1943, with the backing of publishers Nicholson and Watson (on the recommendation of T. S. Eliot who was an admirer of his), he established Editions Poetry London, which published contemporary verse and prose, as well as art books, in hard cover. Tambimuttu was also a regular participant in the BBC radio series Talking to India during the Second World War. A man of charisma as well as a talented editor, he had an array of friends and acquaintances with whom he enjoyed the pubs and cafes of Fitzrovia.

Tambimuttu returned to Sri Lanka in 1949 then moved to New York in 1952 where he launched the magazine Poetry London–New York (1956–60) as well as continuing to publish short fiction and poetry of his own, and lecturing at the Poetry Center and New York University. In 1968 he returned to London where he founded a final magazine, Poetry London/Apple Magazine, which had just two issues, and a publishing company, the Lyrebird Press. He died of heart failure in London in 1983.

Published works: 

Songs of Youth (1932)

Tone Patterns (Colombo: Slave Island Printing Works, 1936)

Out of this War (London: The Fortune Press, 1941)

(ed.) Poetry in Wartime (London: Faber, 1942)

Natarajah: A Poem for Mr T. S. Eliot (London: Editions Poetry London, 1948)

(ed.) India Love Poems (New York: Peter Pauper Press, 1954)

(ed.) Poems from Bangla Desh: The Voice of a New Nation (London: The Lyrebird Press, 1972)

See also editions of Poetry London and Williams (below) for work by Tambimuttu.

Example: 

Tambimuttu, M. J., ‘Fitzrovia’, Harpers & Queen (February 1975), pp. 223, 225, 229–30, 232

Date of birth: 
15 Aug 1915
Content: 

Tambimuttu recounts his arrival in London in 1938, and immersion in the bohemian literary world of ‘Fitzrovia’ and Soho.

Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, W. H. Auden, George Barker, Z. A. Bokhari, Hsiao Ch'ienVenu Chitale, Alex Comfort, Ananda Coomaraswamy (his uncle), Walter de la Mare, G. V. Desani, Indira Devi, Anthony Dickins, Keith Douglas, Cedric Dover, Lawrence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Gavin Ewart, E. M. Forster, G. S. Fraser, Lucian Freud, Diana Gardner, David Gascoyne, Michael Hamburger, Barbara Hepworth, Augustus John, Fredoon Kabraji, Alun Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Richard March, Una Marson, Narayana Menon, Henry Miller, Henry Moore, Anais Nin, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Paul Potts, Kathleen Raine, Balachandra Rajan, Herbert Read, Keidrych Rhys, Francis Scarfe, Elizabeth Smart, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Stephen Spender, Marie Stopes, Alagu Subramaniam, Graham Sutherland, Dylan Thomas.

Contributions to periodicals: 
Extract: 

On the third day after my arrival in London in January 1938…I had already discovered Fitzrovia, and settled down at 45 Howland Street, maybe in the same house where Verlaine and Rimbaud had once conducted their stormy love affair…

...

The first friendships in a new environment have a special quality and meaning and it was at Peter’s party that I first ran across Anthony Dickins, Gavin Ewart, Stephen Spender and Laurence Clark, whose poems I have consistently printed in Poetry London although he was too J. C. Squire-ish and Georgian for most editors...

...

By the end of February 1939, when the first number of Poetry London had been in the bookstalls for a month, with the special souvenir cover drawn by Hector Whistler, nephew of James McNeill Whistler, who came to our chiefly Sibelius musicals at 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning with a steaming pot of hot coffee in his hand…our humble dwelling in Whitfield Street had been visited by many celebrities of today. We had a pre-publication visit from Larry Durrell and his brother Gerald…

...

And thus it was that I became a true Fitzrovian like my friends Augustus John, Roy Campbell, Gavin Maxwell, Elizabeth Smart and Kathleen Raine, all of whom used to visit Fitzrovia with me. But I had it in my soul a very long time ago.

Secondary works: 

Beckett, Chris, ‘Tambimuttu and the Poetry London Papers at the British Library: Reputation and Evidence’, Electronic British Library Journal (2009): http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2009articles/article9.html

Maclaren-Ross, J., Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross Ltd, 1965)

Poologasingham, P., Poet Tambimuttu: A Profile (Colombo: P. Tambimuttu, 1993)

Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Williams, Jane (ed.), Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds (London: Peter Owen, 1989)

Relevance: 

Tambimuttu’s descriptions of meetings and friendships with a range of well known literary figures, such as Gavin Ewart, Stephen Spender, Anais Nin and William Empson, highlight the extent of his immersion in London’s literary life and suggest an acceptance of him on the part of his British friends and associates – and perhaps also a willingness to adapt to a different culture on the part of Tambimuttu. Passing, indirect allusions to his racial difference or ‘foreignness’ are either humorous or, when he retrospectively describes himself as ‘the pioneer’ of the ‘eternal migration and intermingling of cultures’ (perhaps with some exaggeration), almost boastful; and, rather than a sense of cultural dislocation on migration, there is reference to the continuity of his life in ‘bohemian’ London with his early years in Ceylon.

Archive source: 

Meary James Tambimuttu Mss, Add. MS 88907, British Library, St Pancras

Keith Douglas Mss, Add. Mss 53773-53776, 56355-56360, 60585-60586, 61938-61939, British Library, St Pancras

Richard March Mss, Add.  MS 88908, British Library, St Pancras

Reginald Moore Mss, British Library, St Pancras

Northwestern University, Chicago

Poetry London-New York records, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York

Contributors' Talks File 1 (1941-62), BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading 

City of birth: 
Atchuvely, Jaffna Peninsula
Country of birth: 
Ceylon
Current name country of birth: 
Sri Lanka
Other names: 

Thurairajah Tambimuttu

Tambi

Location

45 Howland Street
London, W1T 4BL
United Kingdom
51° 31' 17.4756" N, 0° 8' 15.0792" W
Date of death: 
22 Jun 1983
Location of death: 
London
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1938
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1938–49, 1968–83

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