Introduction

To have been identified as a ‘modern masculinist’ alongside Arnold Bennett and Desmond MacCarthy in an excised passage from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando1 is doubtless one of the lesser highlights in the life of Orlando Cyprian Williams, who from the earliest age was known to friends, family, work colleagues and the reading public as Orlo. Ironically, had the passage been maintained, he may, perhaps, have been better remembered today. Being close to the key players but never in the limelight, however, would seem to be a leitmotif of Williams’s rich, variegated life, characterised by ‘impressive accomplishment’ and ‘gaiety of manner’. Having been a King’s Scholar at Eton, where he was also president of the Musical Society, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he did outstandingly well in Classics and Modern Languages, and proved equally proficient in boxing and fencing. In 1907, he gained his first appointment in public office as a clerk in the House of Commons, where he remained, holding positions of distinction and importance in the wings there throughout his career. He was an officer in World War One, notably serving as Chief Cypher to General Ian Hamilton during the Dardanelles Campaign, and later saw service in Egypt and Palestine before being appointed to the War Office in the department of Military Intelligence. One of his fellow officers in the Dardanelles was former schoolfriend Compton Mackenzie, who remained a life-long friend; it was also at the War Office that he first encountered JMM.

It was his sideline activities as a writer, rather than his military experience and his sporting trophies, of course, that brought Williams into KM’s orbit, although his detailed and sensitive accounts of the ANZAC campaigns in the Dardanelles would doubtless have struck a chord. He was a prolific and eclectic essayist, literary critic, biographer, translator, novelist and short-story writer, whose essays and reviews featured in The Times, Blackwood’s, the TLS and the National Review. He also contributed frequently to the London Mercury, edited by his close friend J. C. Squire. Through another of his friends, Hugh Walpole, he was introduced to KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, whom he visited in Switzerland – thus establishing another overlap with KM and JMM’s life.