Discussing Maurice Benington Reckitt

It seems a natural segue to point out here that, at the bottom of The Jellicoe Blog, there is the following statement and link: "We are grateful for financial support for our work from MB Reckitt Trust."

Imagine my surprise when I spotted the name of one of the croquet cronies of George, Agnes, and Violet Mills at the bottom of a blog about the work of Fr. Basil Jellicoe, the subject of our last two entries!

Do coincidences ever cease around here?

Maurice Benington Reckitt (19 May 1888 – 11 January 1980) is described in Wikipedia as "a leading British Anglo-Catholic and Christian Socialist writer. He edited Christendom, A Journal of Christian Sociology from 1931 to 1950. Earlier he was a supporter of guild socialism and a founder of the National Guilds League."

In addition, it includes this information: "Reckitt was a leading player and croquet administrator winning the Men's Championship twice (1935 and 1946). Reckitt was President of the Croquet Association between 1967 and 1975."


We know that Reckitt [pictured, right, by artist John Prince, versus Charles Colman, whose mustard company had merged with Reckitt's family firm] took to the lawns with the Mills siblings on several occasions, and in tournament play, the database of the Croquet Association shows that Agnes went 0-3 against Reckitt, although she went 2-1 against Maurice's wife, Aimee. Violet Mills was 0-1 against Maurice.

The database shows no records for George Mills, but the erratic London Times search engine does give the results of a single match, played on 10 July 1965 in the second round of Handicap Doubles at Budleigh Salterton, in which George paired with Maurice in a loss to Mrs. R. B. N. Smartt and Miss J. Cooper, (-4). Mills and Reckitt presumably had played together and won in the first round.

I admit to being clueless as to how doubles partners were arranged in croquet at that level, and so have no idea if this indicates if the men were close, or if chance happened to make them partners.

Reckitt was born into the fortune of the family business, Reckitt & Sons, now Reckitt Benckiser. It only took a few moments for me to locate several of their products beneath our kitchen sink, in the laundry, or within the refrigerator here in Ocala: Brasso, Cling Free, Frank's Red Hot, Resolve, Old English, Lime-A-Way, Spray 'n Wash, Easy Off, and French's Mustard.

Maurice was not really involved much in the family business, however.

It is not my purpose to write a biography of Reckitt—that's been done. In 1941, at the age of approximately 53 Reckitt wrote an autobiography entitled As It Happened: An Autobiography. He was also the subject of the 1988 biography Maurice B. Reckitt by John S. Peart-Binns.

Ample material regarding his life and the founding of "The MB Reckitt Trust" (originally "The Christendom Trust" before 2005) can also be found at http://www.mbreckitttrust.org/history.html.

Nor is it merely my purpose to point out the next (now almost expected) coincidence regarding the fact that George Mills seems to have been a bystander (and perhaps and acquaintance, or even friend) while two British men of great social and spiritual import—Reckitt and Jellicoe—fought on behalf of Christian social causes. Long after the death of both men, their names are linked by the association of Reckitt's trust with the Jellicoe Community.

The following is an excerpt from information on the history of the trust at the website mentioned above:

Reckitt was brought up as an Anglo-Catholic, and as a young man became involved with guild socialism and various Christian social movements. During the First World War, he joined the Labour Research Department, and in 1923 became Chairman of the League of the Kingdom of God. His most enduring achievement was Christendom, a quarterly journal of ‘Christian sociology’ which he edited (and largely subsidized) from 1931 to 1950. His vocation, in the words of his biographer, John Peart-Binns, ‘was to be available’. He spent most of his life ‘co-ordinating and leavening the thinking of small groups together with such people as T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, T. M. Heron, Philip Mairet and many priests’. He authored and edited numerous books on Christian social issues, of which the most readable and best-known is his account of the social movement in the Church of England, From Maurice to Temple (1947).


Author Martin Jarrett-Kerr continues elsewhere in that website:

Maurice Reckitt [right] was a comparatively wealthy layman, married but with no children. The Reckitt family derived its wealth from ‘Reckitt’s Blue’ in North East Yorkshire. Maurice was educated privately until university, when he went to St John’s College, Oxford, where he got a good degree in history.

He was brought up as a traditional ‘Anglo-Catholic’, but as a youth he soon became worried by the gap, even contradiction, between his faith and the human and social life around him. As a schoolboy he came under the influence of the fine historian Fr John Neville Figgis, C.R., who was not a typical ‘Christian socialist’ so much as a scholar who saw, and taught others to see, the significance of ordinary ‘worldly’ life in the light of the Christian gospel. After university Reckitt became involved in lively and intelligent groups concerned with social ordering…

When Reckitt went up to Oxford ‘I became’, he said, ‘a Socialist in 1908, and I shall always think that, for my generation, a Socialist was a very good thing to have been.’ But he was disillusioned with the ‘Fabian atmosphere’ of Oxford socialism, and found the Church Socialist League more congenial. His practical work in 1916 was as an assistant in London of the ‘Labour Research Department’: his task was to read, mark and index the trade union press. (This is interesting, as disproving the picture of Reckitt as a rich dilettante talking about egalitarianism in comfortable surroundings.)

Later, in 1923, the Church Socialist League ‘was reborn, not without travail, as the League of the Kingdom of God’. One of its members, Sir Henry Slessor, explained that ‘we came to see that our objective was not the promotion of Socialism, but the advent of the Will of God as expressed in His Kingdom on Earth. A society pledged to forward this purpose, sacramental in doctrine, composed solely of communicants, seemed far nearer to our desires than one pledged to Socialism, in part supported by modernists and persons only sub-Christian in belief.’


Interestingly, the change from "Christendom" to "MB Reckitt" in the actual name of the trust in 2005 was based strictly on practical matters, according to the fund's website: "The change of name was decided upon because the Trustees considered that the term ‘Christendom’ nowadays carries connotations that have nothing to do with either the origins or the focus of the Trust, and which could mislead the public. By using the name of the benefactor who endowed the Trust, continuity with the honourable past of the Trust is maintained."


How the term Christendom (which was also the name of a quarterly journal subsidized and published by Reckitt from 1931 to 1950) came to be used for the trust is exemplified here in this passage written by theologian Duncan B. Forrester:

It has become conventional to assert that we now live in a post-Christendom situation, and to look back patronizingly to the attempts to revive a rather romanticized version of medieval society on the part of Maurice Reckitt, V. A. Demant and the Christendom Group, or even T. S. Eliot in his The Idea of a Christian Society, with its ringing pronouncement that ‘The Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society – which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians. It would be a society in which the natural end of man – virtue and well-being in community – is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural – beatitude – for those who have the eyes to see it . . .’ But if that kind of political theology has had its day with the recognition that Christendom has passed away beyond recall, there remains an urgent need for a post-Christendom beyond theology.

Reckitt's vision, however, probaby is summed up better in what is essentially a mission statement for The MB Reckitt Trust: "Being and building communities that are diverse and cohesive, in order to bring about a stronger society."

The Mills family, notably George's father, the Revd Barton R. V. Mills, struggled with at least some aspects of religion. The elder Mills converted to Roman Catholicism during his time at Christ Church, Oxford, but spent virtually the rest of his life as an Anglican vicar, chaplain, and cleric, even having been an assistant chaplain at the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, in which one of his first services was during the funeral of Queen Victoria.

Barton Mills was an erudite man, a lover of history, chess, and debate, and a scholar whose translations and interpretations of the work of Bernard of Clairvaux are still cited today. He also gave of himself, serving as an Acting Chaplain to the Forces during the First World War, in which sons Arthur and George served, and as an officer of the Associated Societies for the Protection of Women and Children, and as founder of the Association for Improving the Status of the Unbeneficed Clergy.

Mills seemed to share the belief of Fr. Jellicoe, as explained by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, that: "[H]e had no problem at all in coming to preach in a church part of which was reserved for the service of Christ in the form of his poor."

For the Reverend Mills, this was all about career choices, subjugating personal belief and allowing himself opportunities to do the work to which he felt called, while also being able to support his wife and children. Roman Catholicism was a matter of personal devotion; the Anglican Church provided his public pulpit, as well as his bread and butter.

It would be stunning to me to find out that these theological and deeply personal matters of faith had not been discussed with George, especially just before Barton's death in 1932. This is corroborated by the fact that George's funeral service was held in the Catholic Church of St Peter, Prince of the Apostles [left], at Budleigh Salterton in 1972.

No, the Catholicism of Barton Mills was not a secret taken to his grave.

Reckitt had an Anglo-Catholic upbringing, but his lifetime of work as a Christian socialist seems to have transcended denominational barriers as well.

A 1958 manifest from a ship called the Rangtiki documents it sailing into England from New Zealand with Maurice and his wife, Evelyn Aimee, aboard. Their address is given as "157 St. James Court, Buckingham Gate, London SW1."

While this address is a bit closer to The Guards Museum than the London stomping grounds of the Mills family just to the west of Buckingham Palace Gardens, it would have been within extremely familiar territory to George Mills.

The men also shared a common Oxford background (although Mills did not earn his degree) and likely many similar lifelong beliefs on social and religious subjects. One does not doubt they had their differences regarding how exactly those beliefs should be acted upon, perhaps even assertively expressed over cocktails at the bar in the clubhouse at Budleigh, but their similar backgrounds of privilege, with some devotion to helping those in need, no doubt gave them a wide berth of common ground upon which to stand.

Reckitt's wife, Aimee, was as we know a competitive tennis player in the second decade of the 20th century [Wimbledon 1923, 1925, 1927; pictured, above, in 1927 with Lili Alvarez, Aimee at left], but was apparently not a particularly healthy woman overall. She passed away in 1968.

We also know this from the trust's website:

Miss [Dorothy] Howell-Thomas compiled a ‘Bibliography of Maurice B. Reckitt’s published work, for his ninetieth birthday’ (1978); and this was revised and enlarged in 1980. She also helped the archivist of the University of Sussex to sort out the Reckitt archives deposited there, along with other related material, especially that associated with Reckitt’s friend and colleague, Philip Mairet, sometime editor of The New English Weekly to which Reckitt frequently contributed.


Reckitt lived to the age of 91, and was still active in matters regarding his trust until his death in 1980. His bibliography is vast, and the amount of archival material related to Reckitt's life and work held at the University of Sussex is, to me, astonishing.

In addition to his work on Guilds and Christian social issues and philosophies, Reckitt also penned the text Croquet Today, and as we know, was an avid player of championship caliber, as well as a successful administrator for the Croquet Association, giving him yet another interest in common with George and the spinster Mills sisters.

But Reckitt's legacy is his trust, and its requirement that the projects which it endows should not simply be charities, but institutions and organizations that… well, let Mr. Jarrett-Kerr explain:

From time to time, before his death in 1980, Reckitt protested that the Trust was still behaving in too theoretical a manner. He submitted a ‘Statement’ to be read and discussed at the Trust meeting of 6 May 1973, which emphasized the clauses in the Trust Deed that the Trust is ‘charged with promotion of research into the application of Christian social Thinking’ and with obtaining expert advice ‘upon the form and feasability [sic] of research projects and the areas where they could best be affected’. He feared that the Trust had neglected its duty in this respect – the duty ‘to initiate, seek out and further enquiry into what we may judge to be the vital aspects of modern economic and industrial disorder’. Instead it was ‘tending to confine itself to doing exactly what it began by repudiating – distributing its resources (on) purely charitable gifts.’


Reckitt's trust apparently has stayed true to his vision of not simply bandaging the ills of society, but endowing those who would work to prevent society's wounds from manifesting themselves at all.

Returning to Agnes, Violet, and Sporting Pursuits

Researching George Mills, his family, his acquaintances, his education, professions, his military experience, his neighbourhoods, his communities, and his pastimes can be, to swipe from Lennon & McCartney, a long and winding road. Sometimes it's simply too tempting not to drift away from a line of study—for example, when I received photographs of Joshua Goodland and Warren Hill School a couple of months ago.

Long overdue, it's time to return to some unfinished business!

Earlier this year, we looked at the years the Mills siblings—Agnes, George, and Violet—spent in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, and what immediately stood out was their dedication and apparent skill in the sport of croquet.

We examined their records, tournaments, and comrades from 1947, when the Misses Mills moved to Grey Friars in Budleigh, through to their passing in the early 1970s.

There is no athletic record of George Mills prior to his entrance into the croquet world, but his sisters are a different matter entirely!

To rewind a bit, Agnes Edith Mills was born in Cornwall on 11 June 1895 while her father, the Rev. Barton R. V. Mills, was vicar of Bude Haven. Her mother was Elizabeth Edith Ramsay, whom the widower had married on 11 January the year before. George Ramsay Acland Mills was born a year later on 1 October 1896. Violet Eleanor Mills came along on 17 November 1902, after Barton's father, Arthur Mills, M.P., had passed away and the family relocated to Kensington, London.

There is no record of where or when the girls went to school although they must have. One of the few things we know about them as young ladies is that they would have been well aware of the inception of Robert Baden-Powell's popular scouting movement in 1907, as well as when Agnes Baden-Powell [pictured above, right, with Robert] founded the Girl Guides in 1910. The Mills sisters were about 15 and 8 years of age at the time. They were "keen" on the Guides, presumably with Agnes taking Violet under her wing.

The Girl Guides embraced physical fitness, survival skills, camping, and citizenship—skills and traits that would serve British girls well during what we now know were two major global conflicts on the horizon.

Physical fitness must have been important to the girls. We already know they played competitive croquet into their seventies. Was it a late in life commitment to health, or something in which they had always been involved?

Dr. David Evans of Budleigh Salterton [left], who knew the siblings, recalls that Violet was a good golfer, and that "just after World War Two she was on a ship to South Africa and was invited to represent the national England golf team."

While Dr. Evans's estimate of the time fell on the wrong side of the war, we do know he was correct about the South African voyage. Violet, then 33, steamed into Southampton on 20 April 1936 from Durban, South Africa, via Natal and Madeira, aboard the Edinburgh Castle of the Union Castle Mail Steamship Co, Ltd., along with Gladys Emily Mills, 39, a nurse whose home was in Southern Rhodesia but who was bound for Wallasey, Cheshire, near Liverpool, who intended to make a "foreign country" her future permanent residence, and who was presumably a relative.

This is Violet's only recorded trip abroad and must have been the voyage during which she the golfers made overtures. At 33, she still of an age to play competitive age for golf. She would have been in her mid-40s following World War II, past her prime, and an unlikely candidate for such an invitation.

The search engine at The Times database is notoriously parsimonious about revealing all of its information about any one subject, but we do know that on 19 October 1937, Violet (34 handicap) played in the Ladies' Parliamentary G. A. at the Ranelagh Club in Barnes with a Lady Hampden (almost certainly a relative of her half-brother Arthur, the son of her father's first marriage to Lady Catherine Valentia Mary Hobart-Hampden; Violet was a 30 handicap), and finished third, just 2 feet from the cup on the 19th hole of the competition [right].

On 26 October 1938, Violet played the same tournament and again finished third, with her ball on the 19th fairway, in a competition that took place under adverse conditions in which visibility was only 50 yards.

Finally, at the Ladies' Parliamentary Tournament in Pulborough on 17 May 1939, a 36-year-old Violet was eliminated in the second round "by 6 and 5" at the hands of her opponent, Miss E. Bevin.

Assuming that Violet played in the first round of that tournament, we know there are likely up to 8 times as many results of golfing events that include Violet, but that weren't accessed by the paper's ridiculous search engine. (And, for this marginal access, they charge me a costly premium!)

Besides golf, however, we find that before 1936, Violet was a fairly accomplished lawn tennis player.

On 6 October 1933, she played in the Sidmouth Tournament, but was knocked out in the second round by Mrs. G. Lucas, 6-1, 6-0.

In 1934, she played the Bedford Tournament, beating Miss K. Silas in the first round, 6-3, 6-4, on 31 July, but falling to Miss MacTier in the second round, 6-1, 6-1, on 2 August.

Finally, on 7 October 1938, Violet and her Ladies' Doubles partner, Miss M. C. Hervey, were defeated by the Hon. Mrs. D. Rhys and Miss E. M. Dearman, 6-0, 6-3, in the semi-final round of the Felixstowe Tournament.

Again, unless she and her partner drew a bye directly into the semi-finals, or unless that tournament began in the semi-final round, there must be results which I cannot locate by searching. Given that, there must also be many other tournament results crouching within the Byzantine archives of The Times.

The database reveals only one athletic event for Miss Agnes Mills before 1950: She and her croquet partner, F. E. Green, were defeated by 12 in Handicap Doubles during the second round of the Ealing Tournament on 3 May 1934 [above, left].

While we may never know the extent of the participation of the Misses Mills in organized sports, it is clear that things must not have worked out with the "national" team which extended an invitation to Violet in 1936. Labouring under the assumption that a membership on the team would have included a place in that autumn's Curtis Cup match against the United States, Violet must not have earned that spot. A British Pathé newsreel, released on 5 November 1936, names each member of England's team, which does not include Violet Mills (Click HERE to view the newsreel; additional footage is HERE).

Still, even to be considered for that prestigious team is truly noteworthy in a nation as keen on golf as the founder of the sport, the U.K.

However, we do, in fact, know the extent to which Agnes and Violet were involved in croquet before the Second World War, thanks to the database at the Croquet Association.

We'll look at the involvement of the Misses Mills in pre-WWII croquet next time. Stay tuned!

Grey Friars, a Burial Ground, Croquet, and a Floridian Literary Detective

It's a hazy, winter Sunday morning here in the horse country of Florida. It can't decide if it wants to be cloudy or sunny, chilly or warm. I have a strong cup of coffee and a fine pair of slippers, and I'm savoring this exciting latest entry...

Here's something that doesn't happen every day: George Mills appearing in someone else's blog!

Michael Downes, an author, press officer for Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum, longtime educator, and friend of Who Is George Mills? posted an entry about this website on his own blog, Budleigh & Brewster United, a site celebrates among other things the connection between his corner of East Devon, birthplace of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Salem, Massachusetts, founder Roger Conant, and the United States of America.

You can read the entry at: http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.com/2011/01/who-was-george-mills.html

The first really exciting aspect of his post is the wonderful photograph that Michael has taken of Grey Friars [above, left]. It has been quite awhile since the name Grey Friars appeared as a passing note in the autobiography of Sir Robert Hart, and it certainly proved elusive—until now! I appreciate the effort Michael put into securing, not only the image, but also the permission of the house's owner for its use.

He also posted this intriguing paragraph:

And yesterday afternoon Annie and I spent time at St Peter's Burial Ground searching for the Mills family grave. Maybe the sea mist had something to do with it, but our search was in vain. However I did have the pleasure of meeting a charming and informative 80-year-old local man who was visiting the many graves of his own family members, and who remembered that George Mills and his sisters were croquet-players. It may be that the Croquet Club as well as the Literary Festival organisers will be pleased to learn about the Mills family.


I wish I'd been there to talk with that local gentleman cloaked in the sea mist covering the burial ground as he shared memories of individuals its possible no one has really thought much about for almost 35 years. George, Agnes, and Violet Mills, as far as I know, all died childless, and its quite likely that a fairly distant relative in the 'Glyn Mills Bank' branch of the family came to Budleigh as executor of Violet's will in 1975, disposed of Grey Friars and the siblings' estate, and left.

It certainly would be interesting to read the probate documents of the wills of George, Agnes, and Violet. It would even allow us to discover who owns the copyright of George's novels, and who we might contact to find out what happened to the family's ephemera—photographs, awards, paperwork, ticket stubs, passports, etc.—all of which would be treasures to me!

The fact that the Budleigh Salterton Croquet Club sat just 100 feet or so from Grey Friars [pictured, right] is important to the story of Mills and his sisters as well. Right now I'm in the midst of sifting through literally decades of croquet tournament results in The Times listing a trio initialed "Miss A. E. Mills," "Miss V. E. Mills," and occasionally a "G. R. Mills," all of whom played in tournaments as singles and sometimes in various combinations as doubles.

We know from his books that George Mills was a man who was fond of sports, and his step-brother, Arthur, loved golf, so much so that for the rest of his life he seemingly never lived more than the proverbial stone's throw from a golf course after leaving London in the wake of his divorce from Lady Dorothy Mills.

It seems, however, George's spinster sisters enjoyed sporting activities as well, given their lengthy record as croquet players. I find it hard to believe that a different "Miss A. E. Mills" and "Miss V. E. Mills" paired up so often in tournaments in London and along the southern coast of England.

There are even tennis results in editions of The Times from 1930s in which a "Miss V. E. Mills" played in tennis tournaments.

Apparently Violet, at the age of 33 on 6 September 1936, was finally defeated in the second round of Ladies' Singles at the Sidmouth Lawn Tennis Tournament by a Mrs. G. Lucas, 6-1, 6-0.

Two years earlier, on 2 August 1934, Miss V. Mills was beaten 6-1, 6-1, by Miss MacTier in the third round of the Bedford Tournament.

[The search engine at The Times website is notoriously finicky, so although these are the only two results I can find in this era of London tennis, I by no means can claim its the exhaustive list and invite anyone who can concoct a better strategy for searching those archives to help me!]

Anyway, what we know is that the family enjoyed sports and remained quite active, even into their "Golden Years."

On 26 June 1970, "Miss V. E. and G. R. Mills," +20, defeated "Mrs. N. A. C. McMillan and Mrs. D. Wayman" in the handicap doubles at Parkstone. Violet would have been almost 68 years old, with George approaching 74.

Later that year at Parkstone, L. S. Butler, +10, beat Miss A. E. Mills on 17 September in level singles. Agnes had just turned 75 years of age on June 11.

Michael Downes has mentioned having a friend who is membership secretary of the Budleigh Salterton Croquet Club [pictured, above left]. As I research Agnes, Violet, and George via The Times, I hope they will be able to come up with some additional documentation on a local and more personal level.

Thank you, Michael (and Annie!), most of all for the line in your blog entry which describes me as a "Floridian literary detective." After months of procrastinating about mowing the lawn and painting the house to fool around with my research on George Mills, my wife must surely believe I'm the biggest slacker around.

Now, it appears that I'm a "literary detective," and I feel much better about everything I've been doing here!