A long time ago, I interviewed a remarkable man called Sir Richard Acland. A baronet, he formed the very left wing political party Common Wealth in 1942 and won three by-elections during the Second World War.
The party stood for the public ownership of land and industry and in those war years, when many people dreamed of a fairer world after the torment of war, it attracted a lot of interest.
The arrival of the 1945 Labour government under Clement Attlee triggered the slow decline of Common Wealth and it eventually folded.
Acland went on to become a teacher and when I met him, in the late 1980s, he was still living in a cottage on the estate of Killerton in Devon. The house at Killerton had been in the Acland family forever but Acland gave it over to the nascent National Trust as a gift to the nation.
I remember him as a lovely, generous and intelligent man. He’d been to Marks and Sparks earlier in the day to buy sandwiches for us both. He spoke to me for a couple of hours about the failure of post-war politics, how his beliefs had not varied over time, and how he was convinced one day he would be proved right.
I wrote a novel, English Arcadia, which was based on his life: https://lnkd.in/ec4_kdYd
There has never been, however, a biography of him and occasionally, there is a day when I think I should attempt it.
Today is one of those days.