George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

George Pitt-Rivers (22 May 1890 – 17 June 1966), one of the wealthiest men in England in the interwar period, was an anthropologist and Eugenics expert, who embraced Antibolshevism and Antisemitism and was interned by the British government for two years during World War II.

Life

George Pitt-Rivers was born in London,^[1] his birth registered under the surname Fox in Chesterfield.^[2] He was a son of Alexander Edward Lane Fox-Pitt-Rivers (2 November 1855 – 19 August 1927) and of his wife Alice Ruth Hermione, daughter of Lord Henry Thynne. His father was a son of Augustus Pitt Rivers,^[3] ethnologist and anthropologist and founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum, upon whose death in 1900 he inherited the Pitt-Rivers estate.^[4][5] After Alexander died in 1927, the estate was inherited by George and it was so large that "it was said, albeit with exaggeration, that he could ride from coast to coast without leaving his own land".^[6]

He was a Captain in the Royal Dragoon Guards and took part in World War I. He was wounded in the First Battle of Ypres and subsequently sent to England for surgery and recuperation. After the war he published a book The World Significance of the Russian Revolution, the first of his antibolshevik and antisemitic public activities. During 1922–25, Pitt-Rivers held the position of Principal Secretary and Aide-de-Camp to the Governor-General of Australia, his father-in law. His experience with the Maori led to his lasting interest in anthropology, which he studied in Oxford under Bronisław Malinowski.^[7]

In 1927 he attended the World Population Conference and published a book Clash of Cultures and the Contact of Races. Two years later, Pitt-Rivers was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute; he also represented the Eugenics Society at the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. From 1931 to 1937, Pitt-Rivers held the positions of the Secretary General and Treasurer of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, where he came to contact with German eugenicists Eugen Fischer and his assistant Lothar Loeffler.^[8] During this time, he also became increasingly embroiled in politics, praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Pitt-Rivers was locked up in the Tower of London (1940–1942) during the Second World War as a Moseley-ite Nazi sympathiser under the Defence Regulation 18B.^[9] It was there that he met Stella Lonsdale, who had herself been incarcerated, suspected by the Germans of being an English spy, but who eventually managed to make her way to England – where she was imprisoned for being a German spy.^[10] She became George's mistress, and inherited from him when he died in 1966.^[11] In his Will he left Stella instructions that any property to be sold must be sold individually, rather than as an estate, in order that tenants might buy the properties they leased from the Pitt-Rivers Estate.^[12] Much of the village of Okeford Fitzpaine was thus released.^[13]

Family

George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers was twice married; firstly to the Hon. Rachel Forster (daughter of the 1st Baron Forster) on 22 Dec 1915, the marriage was dissolved in 1930.^[14] They had two sons:

• Michael Pitt-Rivers (1917–1999), a West Country landowner who gained national notoriety in the 1950s when he was put on trial charged with buggery. This trial was instrumental in bringing public attention—and opposition—to the laws against homosexuality as they then stood;
• Julian A. Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001), a social anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a university professor.

George Pitt-Rivers married secondly, on 14 October 1931, Rosalind Venetia Henley,^[15] a biochemist whose parents were the Hon. Anthony Morton Henley (son of the 3rd Baron Henley) and the Hon. Sylvia Laura Stanley (daughter of the 4th Baron Stanley of Alderley), by whom he had a third son:

• Anthony (b. 1932).^[16]

References

Literature

Hart, Bradley W. (2015). George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-4725-6995-0.