Oliver Stephen Macdonell (1878-1959)
Written by Timothy Stanley-Clamp
Early Life
Oliver Stephen Macdonell was born in 1878 into a Scottish family living in Beckenham, Kent. His father James Macdonell (1841-1879; ODNB) was a successful journalist, first in Edinburgh and later in London working for the Telegraph and The Times. His mother, Anna Harrison, was the daughter of Daniel Harrison, a London merchant. As a widow, she ably edited her husband’s book France since the First Empire (1879. His older brothers were Sir Philip J Macdonell (1873-1940), chief justice of Ceylon and Col Daniel Harrison Macdonell DSO (1875-1955). Their father died when Oliver Macdonell was still an infant, leaving his mother to bring up three sons.
Relatively little is known about Macdonell’s early years. He was baptised in Crosthwaite, Keswick in 1886, rather late for an Anglican, which suggests that the family had both Scots and Lakeland antecedents. In 1891, when he was twelve years old, he was boarded with John Wilson Robinson (1853-1907), the celebrated climbing pioneer, at Whinfell Hall, Lorton, where he was most likely schooled by his wife Janet Robinson, formerly a schoolmistress. This experience of Lakeland life and of the Robinson family’s Quaker beliefs would have a lifelong effect on his loyalties and his thinking.
London, India and Burma
Macdonell went on to secure an engineering degree in London and associate membership of the Institute of Civil Engineers (AMICE). He worked for twenty years in India and Burma as a railway engineer and manager, helping to build the national railway network. While in Rangoon in 1913, he married Anne Rachel Harris (b. 1874 at Shatton Lodge in the Lorton Valley), the daughter of Thomas M. Harris JP and granddaughter of Joseph Harris of the Derwent Mill in Cockermouth, a prominent Quaker family. The couple had a son, George Harrison Aeneas Macdonell, whose third name reflects his father’s lifelong identification with his Scottish ancestry. ‘Aeneas’ was a name given to the Macdonell clan chiefs and his second novel alludes more than once to the Jacobite rebellion and the execution in Carlisle of a Macdonell. After Oliver Macdonell’s return to England in the early 1930s, the family settled at Greenbank in Papcastle with its imposing views towards Grasmoor and Whiteside which preside over the Vale of Lorton, where he had spent his adolescence. He died at the Cockermouth Cottage Hospital on 7 March 1959.
Writing in Cumberland
Oliver Macdonell joined the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society in 1934 and retained his membership until 1950. His sponsor was R. G. Collingwood, the distinguished archaeologist and philosopher. By this time, Macdonell’s first novel, George Ashbury: A Tale of Lakeland had been published. It is reasonable to speculate that Collingwood took an interest in its author because of his enthusiastic engagement through fiction with the local history of Cumberland. His father W.G. Collingwood had published several Lakeland novels including Thorstein of the Mere (1895) and may well have been an inspiration. George Ashbury (Selwyn & Blount, 1932) was an adventure romance of early nineteenth century smuggling and derring-do with a vividly realised Lakeland landscape and a cast of characters, drawn from Macdonell’s childhood memories of rural life and customs, speaking in a conscientiously detailed local dialect. The book was a popular success; it went into several impressions until 1937 and was reprinted by Hutchinson in 1974.
Macdonell’s second novel, Thorston Hall, articulated more clearly Collingwood’s view of history as a reconstruction of the past in which the imagination plays an energetic role, particularly in re-enacting the ways in which ideas and thinking were translated into action. Subtitled A Tale of Cumberland Farms in The Old Days (Selwyn & Blount, London, 1936) the story places its characters in a world which demands intellectual as well as moral engagement with the challenges they face. It deals in considerable detail with the agrarian upheavals in Cumberland which brought about the decline of the statesman class, and provides a sympathetic portrait of Quakerism as its community of believers debated how to fit in with wider society in the latter years of the nineteenth century. The fact that the second novel was much less successful commercially than George Ashbury may have disappointed both author and mentor but need not deter a modern reader from preferring the historical rigour of its successor.
His Motivation and Legacy
That Macdonell achieved success in the two very different fields of engineering and creative writing reflects his breadth of ability. He would have grown up knowing of his father’s research into France’s First Empire and his mother’s determination to see this work through the press. Their book, which is still in print, has been described as ‘an unparalleled dive into the turbulent waters of French politics’ (2016 edn). That his brothers shared his ability is manifest in their own successes in the law and the army, whilst the importance of Cumberland in his own childhood and indeed in that of his wife led to their return to the county. There he engaged with local history research and marshalled literary skills which led to the publications which preserve elements of lost Lakeland traditions and language. As he lived for twenty years after the date of his second novel, it is indeed a shame that he did not persist.
Sources
- CWAAS membership records
- England & Wales BMD Indexes via Ancestry.com
- England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 database via FamilySearch
- England & Wales Census 1901
- England & Wales Deaths via Findmypast
- London Evening Standard, 5 December 1913
- Tim Stanley-Clamp, Thorston Hall by O.S. Macdonell, Wanderer, August 2021, Lorton & Derwentfells Local History Society
- Michael Waller, A Lakeland Climbing Pioneer: John Wilson Robinson of Whinfell Hall, 2007
- 1939 Register England & Wales