Introduction

William Aylott Orton was born in Bromley, Kent, on 9 February 1889. He was the eldest of the five children of William Amor Orton and Emma Orton (neé Aylott). His father was a well-to-do grocer and provision merchant in Greenwich. Though he won a scholarship to University College, London, he left to begin training as an architect, a profession he soon abandoned. He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1913, but volunteered for the army at the outbreak of war in 1914, serving as an officer, initially with the 7th (Reserve) Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, and then in Gallipoli, Egypt and France. After being wounded at the Battle of the Somme, he was assigned to the intelligence staff of the War Office until 1919. He married Olmen Marlais Moment in 1917, and eventually earned his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1919. He then went to work in the industrial relations department of the Ministry of Labour. In 1922 he left England for the USA to assume a faculty position in Economics at Smith College, Northampton, where he spent his entire academic career.

Orton was, however, teaching art and music at the Skinners’ School in Tunbridge Wells (disguised in his fictionalised autobiography, The Last Romantic [1937], as ‘Tanford Hills Grammar School’), when he met KM in the autumn of 1910. They were both attending a weekend tennis party in Hampstead at the home of a German scientist ‘on the research staff of a munitions concern’ and his Austrian wife (‘Paula Berling’ in The Last Romantic), whom Orton had first met while the couple lived in Tunbridge Wells. KM had spent some seven months in Germany the previous year, and seems to have maintained contacts in the Anglo-German community in London, one of whom might have invited her to the party. Indeed, it was around this time that she had a brief affair with Geza Silberer (1876– 1938), the Austrian journalist and playwright, though she burned all his letters in late 1912 after sharing them with JMM. Orton’s account of his intimate relationship with KM – whether it was ever a full-blown ‘affair’ is uncertain – was uniquely recorded in The Last Romantic, in which an entire chapter (XVII, pp. 269–86) is devoted to KM. He told biographer Antony Alpers in 1948 that ‘nothing in that book is faked, although the temptation to alter was often very strong.