My book tells me this was ‘adapted from Malcolm Muggeridge’s BBC Television conversations with Leonard Woolf at Monks House, Rodmell, in March 1967.’
I suppose there must be a video of it? I hope it surfaces or gets broadcast at some point - maybe we just really need to raid the BBC archives.
Anyway, it’s quite long, but very interesting. He’s absolutely brilliant.
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Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived together for many years here at Rodmell, on the edge of the South Downs. It was a countryside they grew to love. Their marriage was a close and intimate parternship of two intellectuals. Founder members of what came to be called the Bloomsbury Set. She was the daughter of a distinguished man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen. Brought up in a highly literary atmosphere. Leonard Woolf’s background was different. He was born in 1880 into a comfortable middle-class Jewish family.
We were really very well off until I was twelve when my father died. He was Q.C. and made vast sums of money. But he spent it all in on living in a too large house, with too many children and too many servants. Then he died quite suddenly and my mother was left with nine children and no money coming in. We were immediately much poorer. We transferred ourselves to a smaller house and had three servants instead of about eight and had to be very careful with money. But we didn’t worry very much about it.
You were a really clever boy at school, weren’t you? You found your books easy.
Yes, I think I did from the start. I never had any difficulty with learning things. I liked working and I liked being what used to be called a ‘swot’, and you were always despised if you were a swot. I have always been an unredeemed intellectual and really I think that in England one is under grave suspicion if you are an intellectual.
