SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN AND THE NEW SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

As Chair of Wrekin Trust, I have to declare an interest in this book – it was commissioned by the Trust, and we are truly delighted with the result! We thought it fitting that Sir George's biography be written sooner rather than later while many of the more senior people who had known him were still around to give their reminiscences. The book is both a biography and an account of the larger context of George's life. It begins with a wonderfully evocative account of his family background at Wallington, the family seat that was later given to the National Trust. George's grandfather, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, was a minister in Gladstone's cabinet, while his father Sir Charles served as Education Secretary in Ramsay Macdonald's Labour cabinet, which did not endear him to his aristocratic neighbours. His uncle was G.M. Trevelyan, the historian Master of Trinity, where George also studied history.

This gave George a distinguished but radical background with little interest in things of the spirit. After Cambridge George was one of the first to learn the Alexander Technique (but could not make a living out of it) and spent two years in Ernest Gimson's furniture studio in the Cotswolds, where he made a number of pieces admired by visitors to his barn in later years. He began to find his vocation as a teacher when he was appointed to Gordonstoun before the war, but the real turning point came in 1942 when he heard a lecture by the prominent follower of Rudolf Steiner, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein. I well remember George's account of this, for him, amazing evening as his whole being resonated with what he heard.

After the war George was appointed Warden of the adult education centre at Attingham Park in Shropshire where he began the work on spiritual education for which he is remembered today. Such topics had to be introduced judiciously so as not to upset the authorities and unbalance the general programme, but they were always sold out, so he could carry on. It was at Attingham that some of the early meetings of the Soil Association were held, and where he first met Peter Caddy and became involved in the early days of Findhorn. When he retired in 1971 he set up Wrekin Trust and, with Malcolm Lazarus and others, ran an extensive programme of conferences for over twenty years.

Frances Farrer makes George come alive in these pages with the quality of her writing and felicity of expression, which means that the book can be enjoyed for its own sake even by those less interested in its main subject matter. Her sense of humour is never far away, which enables her to give a sympathetic but candid account of his life and work. This means, for instance, not glossing over the difficulties he had with his father or his marriage; and for someone who only knew him in later life, his early lack of confidence comes as a surprise. Needless to say, the book contains many stories about George, but my favourite was an impromptu visit he made to Montacute House, where he was naturally accosted by someone asking what he thought he was doing. On other such visits, he usually found that saying he was Sir George Trevelyan did the trick, but on this occasion the tactic backfired when he was roundly told 'well in that case you should know better!' The book is an absorbing and entertaining account of a remarkable life.