Ian Duncan Colvin

Artist Info

Ian Duncan ColvinInverness, Scotland, 1877 - 1938, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no00066782

Colvin, Ian Duncan [pseud. Rip Van Winkle] (1877–1938), journalist, was born at Inverness on 29 September 1877, the second son of Duncan Colvin, Free Church minister, and his wife, Grace Macpherson Strother. He was educated at Crieff Academy and at Inverness College, and worked for a short time on the Inverness Courier before going in 1897 to Edinburgh University, where he studied under the professor of rhetoric and English literature, G. E. B. Saintsbury, and won the gold medal for history and literature.

Having left Edinburgh for London, where he served for a time in the London office of the Allahabad Pioneer, Colvin went to India in 1900 to join the staff of that journal. Three years later he moved to South Africa and the Cape Times under Maitland Park. Apart from his leading articles, he became famous there for his political verse and tales signed Rip van Winkle. He returned to London in 1907 and married, in 1909, Sophie, daughter of the Revd George Robson of Edinburgh. They had three sons and one daughter.

In 1909 Colvin became a leader writer on the Morning Post, then edited by Fabian Ware, and, from mid-1911, by H. A. Gwynne. He remained on this ultra right-wing daily for the rest of his, and its, career. He did so, despite approaches from other papers, because, in his words, ‘Most newspapers are lost in the pursuit of Mammon, party, etc.’ and because ‘A paper without a cause is a paper without soul—and must rot’. Colvin spearheaded many of Gwynne's causes and political campaigns, and was the inspiration behind the one which, begun in 1915, led to the formation of the National Party in 1917, a party which Colvin wished had ‘a good Aristocrat’ to lead it. During the First World War Colvin was a member of the council and of the executive committee of the Anti-German Union. He saw the war, however, as

really a spiritual struggle not with Germany only but with what is bad in ourselves. We had sunk into such a horrible slough of corruption, selfishness and false ideas before the war, that if the Germans had been wise enough to keep the peace, they might have conquered us in ten years time without a war. (Colvin to Lady Bathurst, 7 May 1914, 10 July 1915, Glenesk-Bathurst MSS 2948, 2948a)

Colvin espoused protectionism, excoriated free trade, and wished to eliminate all manifestations of socialism and radicalism from the British Isles. Having published The Germans in England, 1066–1598 in 1915 and The Unseen Hand in English History in 1917, he went on, noting that Sir Francis Bacon had put ‘strangers as foreigners’ as one cause of revolutions, to contribute more (36 per cent) than any of the other contributors to The Cause of World Unrest (1920), Gwynne's exegesis of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the 1920s Colvin was active in the Morning Post's denunciation of Lloyd George's attempt to settle the Irish question, and its championing of General Dyer's action at Amritsar in 1919, when he ordered British troops to fire into an unarmed crowd. Colvin went on to produce a typically hagiographical Life of General Dyer in 1929, to follow his Life of Jameson of 1922.

Throughout the 1930s Colvin and the Morning Post steadfastly opposed all moves in the direction of the independence of India, and made clear their sympathies with the cause of General Franco in Spain.

The satirical style of his political commentaries continued to have many admirers across the political spectrum, but fewer and fewer readers—if the circulation figures of the Morning Post are anything to go by—remained of that paper's, and Colvin's, die-hard persuasions.

Intermittent ill health did not prevent Colvin from publishing, in 1934 and 1936, volumes 2 and 3 of the Life of Lord Carson (Edward Marjoribanks had produced volume 1 in 1932). His satirical verse was collected in Party Whips (1912), Intercepted Letters (1913), and a Wreath of Immortelles (1924). On 10 May 1938 he died at Old Court Clinic, Hangar Lane, Ealing, London.

Keith Wilson

Sources

DNB · The Times (12 May 1938) · K. M. Wilson, A study in the history and politics of the Morning Post, 1905–1926 (1990) · U. Leeds, Glenesk-Bathurst MSS · Bodl. Oxf., MSS H. A. Gwynne · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1938)