The solemn
and uncompromising economist: Gerald Shove, 1887–1947
This may seem rather left-field for the
blog, but Gerald Shove is related to Alice Edith Vlieland (his mother’s sister) and William Millen (Alice Edith’s father who farmed with Gerald’s
father at Syndale and Plumford until Herbert Shove’s early death); he also has
a possible connection to ArchibaldVlieland in Singapore. William Shove,
Gerald’s elder brother, was the best man at the wedding in 1906 of Frances Maude Vlieland and Reginald Peel. The bare biographical
details of Gerald’s life already in the blog tell only a small part of the
story.
In Fredegond Shove’s poem ‘The Farmer’, written in 1917, the year
of Cambrai and Passchendaele, she attempts to call up the essence of her new husband.1
‘The Farmer’ imagines a man of ‘solemn and uncompromising form’ walking in a
field of new corn while at his back are the ‘Wide hosts of men who once could
walk like him/Worn dull, quenched dry, gone blind and sick with war’ whose
shades will bless him when peace comes and new life returns to the earth he has
tilled. It is a romantic portrait, and Fredegond was often mocked for a
devotion that was entirely blind to the darker side of her husband’s psyche,
but it captures many of the contradictions that shaped Gerald Shove’s life. He
was a conscientious objector and activist for peace who went before a Tribunal in
1915 to argue his case when he could have claimed a medical exemption from
fighting. A brilliant schoolboy scholar, he initially faltered socially and academically
as an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, being deprived of his
scholarship after achieving only a Second in the first part of his Classics
examinations (but a First after he switched to Economics). He was capable of both
passionate love and destructive anger, particularly at what he saw as ‘filthy
convention’ and outworn morality. And he was an economist who devised what are
now seen as radical solutions to the contemporary problems of industrial hardship
and unemployment, who published primarily as a contributor to others’ work and requested
that all his papers be destroyed at his death.
Gerald Frank Shove was born in November
1887 at Queen’s Court farm, Ospringe, Kent, to Herbert Samuel Shove and Bertha
Millen, the daughter of William Millen
of Syndale and younger sister of AliceEdith Millen. Bertha married Herbert
in May 1885, when she was 20 and he 31; she was widowed four years’ later, when
William was almost 3, Gerald 2 and a half and Ralph 2 months old. She was by
all accounts a beauty, and after Herbert’s death must have been effectively
imprisoned at home with her brothers and recently widowed father (Phoebe Millen had died in the spring of
1889), with Alice Edith far away in Exeter (although she was at Ospringe in
February 1888 for the birth of Phoebe Mary Vlieland). The name ‘Shove’
(which rhymes with ‘stove’, not ‘shove’, meaning ‘to push out of the way’) is
both Old English (‘scufa’) and Dutch (‘schave’) in origin: it is amazing to
think that there might have been two Dutch-heritage families living side by
side in Syndale!
Economics (originally called ‘political
economy’ or ‘economic science’) began as
an academic discipline in Cambridge in 1903, and Gerald was one of its first
students. He revered Alfred Marshall, the founder of the School of Economics
and Political Science, but thought that he overlooked ‘the ebb and flow ... of
resources from one occupation to another’ and ‘the economic problem of the real
world’ which was ‘a question of fitting ... into its appropriate niche a vast
number of ... individuals’: ‘a jig-saw puzzle’. What few papers he did publish
show what Nicholas Kaldor has called his ‘originality as a dauntless thinker’, determined
that economic prescriptions about employment and labour should address the
actual experience of working men in the 1930s, forced into either unemployment
or on to the new US-style industrial production lines.
Gerald was part of the generation born
around 1885–95: often dissolute and even debauched, many of them fought and
died less than five years after graduation. Hugh Popham, for example, a friend
of Gerald at King’s who courted scandal by having an affair with Bertha in 1912,
won the Croix de Guerre in 1918 for his bravery as a Royal Navy Air Service flyer
over France. What Fredegond termed Gerald’s ‘eager friendships’ with fellow
members of the Apostles2 at King’s, including Maynard Keynes, James
Strachey and Rupert Brooke,3 were almost certainly homosexual;
certainly Gerald’s letters to Keynes between 1909 and 1913 show him psychologically
negative and greedy for social and academic approval.4 Despite
Keynes’ advocacy, his Fellowship dissertation was rejected in 1912 and on
graduation he studied for the legal Bar until he was sent to work as a farm
labourer under the terms of his Tribunal decision. During the war, he published
the pacifist journal Face the Facts
and attempted unsuccessfully to rouse his fellow CO farm workers to strike for
improved pay and conditions. Back at Cambridge as a Lecturer in 1923 and Fellow
in 1926, he was essentially Keynes’ academic dogsbody to the detriment of his
own work, taking on much of the latter’s teaching and administration while
Keynes was working on the post-war peace settlement. He organised public
meetings and rallies for the New Peace Movement throughout the 1930s but they
withered once war was declared in 1939. He became ill with cancer in 1946 and
died a year later; Fredegond survived him by only two years.
There is a plausible but unprovable
postscript to this story. We know that when Robert Brooke-Popham arrived as
Commander-in-Chief in Singapore in November 1940 he was appalled to find that
military strategy was in the hands of ArchieVlieland, a civilian, quarter-Dutch, and Bertha’s nephew. Brooke-Popham had
added ‘Popham’ to his name in 1904 by King’s Warrant, in tribute to his
ancestor Home Riggs Popham, an admiral in the Napoleonic Wars. Is it too long a
shot to suggest that for a man so jealous of his family’s honour, Archie’s
presence was an affront that even further fuelled his determination to hound
him out of office? Bertha died in October 1940, so never knew the longer
consequences of her indiscretion, but Archie’s unmerited disgrace may have
hastened Charles James Vlieland’s
death two years later.
Thanks to Barbara !
1 Fredegond Shove, Fredegond
and Gerald Shove, privately printed, 1952: Fredegond’s memoir of her
husband, written after his death. She was a minor poet, delicate and
home-schooled, who nevertheless made a succession of homes for Gerald in the
damp and squalid labourers’ cottages where they lived for most of his CO
service. Two of her more important poems (‘The New Ghost’ and ‘The Water Mill’
were set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams).
2 Richard Deacon, The Cambridge
Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Élite Intellectual Secret Society,
Robert Royce, 1985: Chapter 6 concerns Gerald’s generation of members.
3 Keith Hale, ed., Friends and
Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey 1905–1914,
Yale University Press, 1998: several letters show that some of Gerald’s friends
considered him their social inferior and were happy to punish any aspiration to
fully enter their charmed circle, nicknaming him ‘Shovel’, ‘Stove’ and ‘his Lordship’.
4 Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Annalisa Rosselli, Economists in Cambridge: A Study Through Their Correspondence,
1907–1946, Routledge, 2005: Chapter 7 has extracts from the Keynes–Shove
correspondence. At least two letters deprecate Keynes’ predatory habits,
stating that Gerald himself had neither the ‘courage or energy for such
adventures’ but offering to act as a defence counsel for him were Keynes to be
arrested.
