Not too many Budleigh people know that a great literary
figure known as ‘the father of science fiction’ stayed in the town. Even fewer
know of him as a pacifist. Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a
favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort.
It was during a cycling holiday in Devon that H.G. Wells and his wife stayed in April 1897 with author George Gissing and his sister Margaret at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh. Ten or so years older than Wells, Gissing is thought to have been attracted to radical pacifist and anti-imperialist ideas partly derived from his reading of Russian literature, particularly from Leo Tolstoy. Later, Wells himself is likely to have been influenced by pacifist and socialist ideas through his membership of the reformist Fabian Society.
Wells’ most famous science fiction novel The War of the Worlds anticipates the role of devastating modern weapons with the Martians’ use of heat-rays and toxic gas against humans. The novel’s publication in 1898 came at a time when the desire for world peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’.
Wells' book Little Wars, published in 1913, was seemingly an explanation of rules for conducting a war game with toy soldiers. In reality it reflected the author’s view of how such activities could replace actual wars. ‘How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!’ he wrote. ‘Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster — and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides.’
Another novel by Wells which appeared in the following year was The World Set Free. Set in 1956, it described the effects of a devastating world war fought with atomic bombs, ending with the establishment of a ‘World Republic’
As World War I approached, Wells became more and more focused on the threat to world peace posed by what he saw as German militarism. His 99-page pamphlet The War That Will End War, published in 1914, proclaimed: ‘This is now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and all the little countries of Europe, are heartily sick of war; the Tsar has expressed a passionate hatred of war; the most of Asia is unwarlike; the United States has no illusions about war.’
A second pamphlet, The Peace of the World, appeared in 1915. A year later saw the publication of Wells’ novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, composed ‘at a time of universal barbarism and cruelty’ in the words of Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who described the work as ‘the finest, most courageous, truthful, and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war’.
In the post-war period, on 15 April 1929, Wells delivered an address entitled The Common Sense of World Peace to the Reichstag German Parliament in Berlin. It was published by the Hogarth Press. But by 1933 the Nazis were burning his books.
H. G. Wells is pictured here one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926.
If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/700424602802079
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