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Introduction
As the longest-serving editor of the New Statesman (1931–60), Kingsley Martin’s papers are both an essential complement to the main Archive and important in their own right as a record of the life and opinions of a senior commentator. Reflecting Martin’s interests as journalist, traveller, author, broadcaster and lecturer, they contain material relating to British domestic politics during the 1930s, international affairs during and after the Second World War, and the development of India after 1947. All these papers have been supplemented by interviews with Martin’s contemporaries recorded by C H Rolph.
The form of the material includes personal papers and travel notebooks. Some documentation relates to Martin’s journalist days, including his three-year grounding at the Manchester Guardian and three-decade editorship of the New Statesman. One file details the early days of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND. Martin himself presided over CND’s first meeting.
Martin’s papers contain significant correspondence with, among
others, Clement Attlee, HN Brailsford, RHS Crossman, EM Forster, Graham
Greene, Tom Harrisson, Aldous Huxley, JM Keynes, JB Priestley, Bertrand
Russell and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Five files hold George
Bernard Shaw-related material ranging from 1914 to 1946, principally Shaw’s
letters to the New Statesman and to others including Sidney and Beatrice
Webb and Harold Laski. One further file pertains to HG Wells and includes
Wells’s letters to the New Statesman and essays Martin wrote
about him. Material on the Cold War, meanwhile, includes cordial letters
from Martin to Khrushchev.
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