Walter William Strickland
BiographyWalter William Strickland, de jure 9th Baronet (May 26, 1851–August 9, 1938) was an English translator and radical. He became known as the “Anarchist Baronet” because he wandered around the world for much of his life espousing radical causes. After receiving Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1923 he renounced his British citizenship.
Strickland was born in Westminster while the family estate was at Hildenley Hall near Malton, North Yorkshire. He was the eldest son of Sir Charles Strickland, 8th Baronet (1819–1909), the only child of his first marriage to Georgina, daughter of Sir William Milner, 4th Baronet, but he never formally used the title he inherited upon his father’s death. Educated at Edinburgh Academy and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1888 he married Eliza Vokes (1860–1946). A polyglot fluent in ancient and modern languages, he wrote several books and pamphlets and translated works of the Czech poet Vítězslav Hálek, as well as Molière and Horace. He has been linked with the Voynich manuscript and may have met Wilfrid Voynich during his first years in London.
In the early 1890s Strickland went to live abroad. In 1911 he sold the family home, which became a convent. After 1912 he did not live in England. He spent some time in Russia and in 1923 became a citizen of Czechoslovakia, formally renouncing his British citizenship and declaring he would not be using the title. (There is no mechanism for a baronet to renounce the title, although it is possible to cease using it during his lifetime.)
Strickland had libertarian, socialist, anarchist, and atheist ideas. His anti-British and anti-imperialist activities were widely reported in the English-speaking press, particularly The Times and Daily Express, making him somewhat of a celebrity, while his wandering led him to be dubbed a “gypsy.” He believed he was the subject of assassination plots by the British, stating in a letter to a London newspaper, “The vulgar, ungentlemanly, and, indeed, murderous persecution to which I have been subjected is exclusively British.” But according to British intelligence, Strickland was thought to be of “doubtful sanity.” He left his family fortune to a disgraced and poverty-stricken socialist named Guy Aldred, founder of the Glasgow Anarchist Group, who immediately upon hearing the news formed the “Strickland Press,” bought a hall, bookshop, and machinery, and proceeded reprinting his old anarchist pamphlets. Unfortunately for Mr. Aldred, the will was contested and he never received a dime.
Bibliography (incomplete)
Segnuis Irritant: Eight Primitive Folk-Lore Stories (1896)
Other links
Wikipedia