“A Certain Matter Which He Could Not Describe in Any Way”
When Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley, daughter of the infamous Aleister, was laid to rest a couple months short of her second birthday, one who learned of her fate remarked that she had died of “acute nomenclature.” While the quip may seem cruel, its author—Crowley’s old friend L.C.R. Duncombe-Jewell—was himself a fellow sufferer of that curious affliction.
The condition was, in his case, a progressive one. It is under the name Richard D. Jewell that he first appears in extant records, where in 1871 he was listed as the infant son of a bank manager in Liskeard, Cornwall. By the time Jewell married in November 1895, he had appended the family name Duncombe to his surname so that he might inherit his grandmother’s property in accordance with her will, a not-uncommon arrangement at the time. His official name at this point was Louis Charles Richard Duncombe-Jewell (no idea where the extra pair of given names came from). In 1903, he inexplicably changed Louis to Ludovick and, in honor of a supposed Scottish ancestor and possibly to evade creditors, assumed yet another additional surname: Cameron. L.C.R.D.J. Cameron, luckier than poor Lilith Crowley (as she was known), would survive to the age of 80.
Early in life, Duncombe-Jewell—let’s call him that—moved with his family to London. The Jewells were members of an evangelical sect called the Plymouth Brethren. So were the Crowleys, and the two men met through family connections around 1890, when Crowley was 14 and Duncombe-Jewell 23 or so.
Duncombe-Jewell started out as a banker’s clerk but soon turned to journalism. He drew on his experience in a volunteer infantry regiment to write for newspapers about military affairs. As a correspondent in Spain and South Africa, he reported on the 1898 Carlist uprising for The Times and the Boer War for the Morning Post. Despite these notable assignments, his work did not always meet expectations. When he covered the launch of the HMS Albion for the Daily Mail, the news editor demanded to know why his copy made no mention of the wave produced when the battleship slipped into the Thames, tragically engulfing many spectators and drowning 34—perhaps the worst disaster on the river in history. “Well,” he replied, “I did see some people bobbing about in the water as I came away, but….”
Duncombe-Jewell was the author of a score of works of fiction and non-fiction, including such titles as Otters and Otter-Hunting, The Wild Foods of Great Britain: Where to Find Them and How to Cook Them, The Hunting Horn: What to Blow and How to Blow It, A Guide to Fowey and Its Neighborhood, The Handbook to British Military Stations Abroad, Minor Field Sports, The Lady of the Leash: A Sporting Novel, and Rhymes of Sport in Old French Verse Forms. Though he concentrated on scouting, sporting (i.e., hunting and fishing), military, and antiquarian topics, he did not entirely neglect the mystical. He contributed articles on “Superstitions Connected with Sports” (“The sportsman of to-day is not usually regarded by the cognoscenti as one to whom a belief in ‘the conviction of things that appear not’ appeals with any great force.” Did Wodehouse ever do better?) and “The Mystery of Lourdes” to Occult Review, and his bibliography of Crowley’s early publications is still consulted.
In 1902, Duncombe-Jewell went through some crisis whose nature can only be guessed. On November 17 of that year, he attended one of W.B. Yeats’s regular Monday evenings at home. The occult-minded tea heiress Annie Horniman was there, and Duncombe-Jewell asked her to read his tarot cards for guidance in—as Yeats put it—“a certain matter which he could not describe in any way.” Duncombe-Jewell confided in Yeats that he had been sleeping little and hinted darkly, “This may be social extinction for me.”
On April 28, 1903, his wife gave birth to a son; on April 29 of the following year, she died in surgery. One can only speculate how these events affected him, or whether he was present for either. Around the time of his son’s birth, in the spring of 1903, he turned up at Crowley’s new house in Scotland. “I had asked him to spend a week at Boleskine,” wrote Crowley in his memoirs, “and he managed somehow or other to settle down there as my factor”—that is, his secretary. He stayed on for several years. Crowley notes that when Duncombe-Jewell arrived, “he called himself Ludovick Cameron, being a passionate Jacobite and having a Cameron somewhere in his family tree. He was very keen on the Celtic revival and wanted to unite the five Celtic nations in an empire. In this political project he had not wholly succeeded: but he had got as far as designing a flag. And, oh so ugly!”
“Cornish Is Not Yet Dead”
Crowley’s account of his houseguest’s politics is accurate except in one respect, as we will see. Duncombe-Jewell was indeed a Jacobite, which is to say he wanted the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of 1649 and 1688 overturned and a descendant of James Stuart II, the last king to rule without consent of parliament, restored to the English, Scottish, and Irish thrones. In 1892, he praised a Jacobite society known as the Order of the White Rose, whose “most necessary and salutary work,” he wrote, “lies in its unvarying and strenuous opposition towards ‘all that tendeth to Democracy’… this many-headed, million-mouthed, enormous, and disaster-spreading monster.” By 1894, he was editing the Order’s periodical organ, The Royalist. The journal bore on its cover the last word of Charles I before his execution by a parliamentary tribunal—“Remember!”—and on its masthead the anti-democratic motto “Beware of those who have nothing to lose.” It was funded by Henry Jenner, an antiquarian and philologist working as keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, who quietly served as chancellor of the Order. Jenner was the son of a notoriously high-church Anglican bishop, and he and Duncombe-Jewell would both convert to Roman Catholicism. The two men also shared a Romantic fascination with traditional Celtic folkways, an interest in keeping with their affinity for the Scottish Stuart line.
Jacobitism is a species of Legitimism, the support of monarchy by hereditary right. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the far-right Legitimist movement championed the coming to power of supposedly authentic royal bloodlines across Europe. The movement was by no means purely ideological. In 1899, Jenner helped organize a secret conspiracy to smuggle arms to monarchist insurgents fighting to overthrow the first Spanish republic, the same conflict Duncombe-Jewell had been covering for The Times. Both Duncombe-Jewell and Crowley had an active part in this plot, which was foiled when a British vessel bearing guns and ammunition was seized off the coast of Arachon.
Where Crowley went wrong was in speaking of his friend’s political aim as that of uniting the “five Celtic nations”—Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and the Isle of Man. In fact, Duncombe-Jewell’s mission for the past two years had been to have his native Cornwall, the southwesternmost county of England, recognized as the sixth such nation.
Duncombe-Jewell was an unlikely spokesman for the county’s cause, having left Cornwall as a young adolescent and never returned for any considerable period or owned any property there. Yet it was he who intervened in the Celtic Association, a cultural organization founded a few years earlier, when the question of Cornwall’s Celtic identity arose in 1901. Against doubts that the county was ineligible for membership in the association since no Celtic language was spoken there, he insisted: “Cornish is not yet dead. It is still spoken and written by several persons. Only a short time since I received a postcard written in Cornish.” Duncombe-Jewell’s impassioned paper on the subject, read to the inaugural Pan-Celtic Congress in August 1901, was politely received, but skepticism about the status of Cornish as a living tongue persisted, and the issue of recognition was tabled until the next meeting three years hence.
In October 1901, Duncombe-Jewell published two further items in Celtia, the association’s journal. One was a plea entitled “Cornwall: One of the Six Celtic Nations,” and the other was the first-ever Cornish-language sonnet. The next May, he made use of the same forum to announce he had founded the Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak (Celto-Cornish Society). Its aims were the preservation of Cornish archaeological relics such as stone circles and holy wells, the promotion of the “truly Cornish” sports of wrestling and hurling, and the revival of Cornish language and literary culture. A number of prominent Cornishmen accepted positions as officers, including Jenner as a vice president, but there is no sign the society ever met as a body, and its activities seem to have been restricted to the sending of letters by its honorary secretary, Duncombe-Jewell, to the Celtic Association for publication in its journal. In one that was printed four months later, he recommended for general use a fanciful Cornish national costume of his own design, which he was seen to wear at a neo-traditional bardic competition that year in Bangor, Wales. It consisted of a kilt, tunic, and hose, all of home-dyed blue, topped with a blue conical hat to which might be pinned a sprig of broom.
The society’s proposals attracted little notice within Cornwall itself, and what response they did receive was at best equivocal. According to scholar Amy Hale, “the conservative Royal Cornwall Gazette… stated that the Cornish were better off learning English, and hoped that no serious attempt would be made to reintroduce the language. The liberal West Briton put forth similar sentiments, stating that the reintroduction of Cornish would ‘be a great hardship.’’’ Hale points out that when at this very time questions about the origin of St. Piran’s flag and the tune of the Cornish anthem “Trelawney” were widely debated in the local press, the Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak did not see fit to comment, nor were these living symbols of Cornish identity acknowledged by the society.
Duncombe-Jewell’s advocacy of the Celto-Cornish cause was in fact confined to the rarefied pages of Celtia, where his name last appears in the April 1903 issue. His final contribution is in answer to a rebuke by the association’s president for his intemperate attack on a Celtic Studies lecturer who had belittled Cornish literature. Duncombe-Jewell called the professor “ignorant,” “blind,” and even a “Saxon.” The president scathingly replied, “If the first use the Cornish Celts are going to make of their introduction into our larger world of the Celtic Association is to describe our fellow workers in Scotland as ‘parasitical posturers,’ etc.,… I think it would be well if some notice were taken of this attitude.”
Duncombe-Jewell’s rejoinder was defiant, and yet it was the last thing he wrote on Celto-Cornish matters. He may have been discouraged by the bitter tone of the exchange, or else distracted by the problem that led him to flee to Crowley’s Boleskin House on the shore of Loch Ness. From then on, as we have seen, his newfound Scottish identity came to the fore. As a matter of fact, maybe Crowley had it right after all, and by the spring of 1903 Ludovick Cameron had altogether washed his hands of Cornwall.
It was left to Henry Jenner to carry on the work of the Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak. He did so ably with an acclaimed address to the Pan-Celtic Congress of 1904 that finally won Cornwall its place as the sixth member nation, as well as the publication that same year of his now-classic Handbook of the Cornish Language. Today, Duncombe-Jewell’s seminal contributions are all but forgotten, and it is Jenner who is remembered as the father of the early twentieth-century Cornish Revival.
“On the Bitter Broken Hills of Life”
Whatever scandal it was that drove Duncombe-Jewell in 1903 to take refuge under another name far away from his wife and newborn child, I believe the episode holds a key to his cultural and political projects. Whether the unnameable trouble that led him to seek occult counsel at Yeats’s was a matter of finances, morals, domestic life, the law, family relations, his career as a writer, or any combination of these, the incident brings home the profound instability of middle-class existence in the late Victorian period, when one wrong step in any of these spheres might result in penury and “social extinction.” Respectability was all, making any position one managed to come by intrinsically precarious. Industrialization, education reform, and expanding opportunities in business and the professions had raised new heights for common people to scale even as the rapid growth of an urban underclass opened a new abyss in which to tumble. Meanwhile, the rise of organized labor and a mass socialist movement seemed to threaten the loss of hard-won privileges under mob rule.
These anxieties tempted many middle-class intellectuals at the turn of the century to seek faith and renewal by means of reviving the better-ordered forms of an imagined past. Some dreamed of a restoration of monarchs appointed by God. Some advanced an aristocratic cultural nationalism that was often at odds with popular struggles for self-determination. Some converted to the Roman Church, while others turned to spiritualism, Theosophy, or other varieties of occultism.
Duncombe-Jewell was a man of these times, and it is fitting that we should begin our review of the age with a glance in his direction. No aspect of his activities up to the eve of the First World War fails to bespeak a fear of modern, urban life and the flight to some antithetical ideal. Even the subjects of his books, for all their oddity, address themselves with absolute consistency to manly rustic arts, military service, or quaint relics of the past. “Almost everything that is new is also bad,” he wrote.
His later years were less colorful and are in any case far less well documented. So let us conclude with his own verse translation of the Cornish-language sonnet he wrote, a work which surely alludes to the social crisis sketched above and the consolations found by its author.
Regina, Regina Angelorum Veni!
[Queen, Queen of Angels, Come!]
When, on the bitter broken hills of life,
Our tired feet fail against the perilous way;
Our lips are salt with the great ocean’s spray;
And to our ears is borne the deafening strife
Of the wind’s voice: When sorrow takes to wife
The hidden joy in the rose-heart of day,
Whose children are our prayers: When o’er the brae
The curlew’s lamentable cry is rife:
Then come, O Mary, with the promising stars
Sewn in your hair, and hold your moonwhite hand
Over our heads a moment in our loss.
So shall we see beyond the pitiless scars,
God looking forth upon a sobbing land,
And Christ a-dying on the wayside cross.
Note on the Meeting with Yeats
Yeats describes Duncombe-Jewell’s distress in a letter to Lady Gregory of November 18, 1902, printed in his Collected Letters, volume 3 (1994). The relevant passage is reproduced below:
I do not know whether the starry influences are bringing me this sort of thing now, but I had a still more difficult thing of the same kind last night. Pixie Smith and Sturge Moore and Miss Horniman were round with me—Duncomb [sic] Jewell came in looking very ill. He led the conversation round to divination and kept it there nearly all the evening. When Sturge Moore went away he asked Miss Horniman to divine for him as to what he should do in a certain matter which he could not describe in any way. She got out her tarot cards and spread them out. Her voice changed as it does under such circumstances [as] she began advising, and in what I must say seemed to be very general terms but which [were] evidently very significant to him. He stayed on and when everybody had gone said [in Yeats’s hand] “I came back from Ireland on Wednesday. I have not slept since then, with the exception of a few hours today. I have been in great trouble. My conscience has been going here & there like a weather cock. I could not find out what I had to do—I wanted to do right. She has held my conscience still. I know not where it is pointing. But there may be no miracle play now. This may be social extinxion [sic] for me.” I asked no questions but told him not to think clairvoyance infallible.
Duncombe-Jewell’s situation was considered so sensitive by Yeats that he took care to keep his poor friend’s name from the typist when he dictated the letter, adding it afterward—along with the report of their private conversation—in his own hand. Yeats was at the first Pan-Celtic Congress in Dublin where Duncombe-Jewell’s paper was read, but Duncombe-Jewell himself did not attend the gathering. The reference to a miracle play, if literal, may refer to Duncombe-Jewell’s intention to revive the medieval mystery plays that form the great bulk of the Cornish-language literary corpus. “Pixie” Smith, by the way, is the artist Pamela Colman Smith, later commissioned to illustrate the well-known Rider-Waite tarot deck.
Sources
I consulted the 1871 census record; An Index of Changes to Name, 1760 to 1901 compiled by W.P.W. Phillimore and Edw. Alex. Fry (1905); The Royalist, volume V; Celtia, vol. I and vol. II, no. 9; “The True Jacobitism: A Survival,” The Albemarle, vol. 2. no. 1 (July 1892); Otters and Otter-Hunting (L. Upcott Gill, 1908); and “Superstitions Connected with Sport,” Occult Review (May 1908).
I traced the oft-repeated anecdote of Duncombe-Jewell’s coverage of the HMS Albion to Some Piquant People (T.F. Unwin, Limited, 1924), a memoir of Lincoln Springfield, news editor of the Daily Mail.
For Crowley’s account of his dealings with Duncombe-Jewell, see The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Auto-Hagiography, edited by John Symons and Kenneth Grant (1979).
A brief overview of Duncombe-Jewell’s life is given in Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (2010).
The influence of Legitimism and occultism on early Cornish cultural nationalism is explored by Sharon Lowenna in “‘Noscitur a Sociis’: Jenner, Duncombe-Jewell and Their Milieu,” Cornish Studies (2004).
Duncombe-Jewell’s activism with the Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak is detailed by Amy Hale in “Genesis of the Celto-Cornish Revivial?: L.C. Duncombe-Jewell and the Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak,” Cornish Studies (1997). See also her “Rethinking Henry Jenner,” Cornish Studies (2005).
For more on Crowley’s involvement with Legitimism and Celtic nationalism, see Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014).