James Douglas   Born: 9 February 1867 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Died: 1940.     James Douglas was a British critic, newspaper editor and author. He served as editor of the Sunday Express from 1920-27 and co-editor with John Gordon from 1928-1930. He was born in Belfast on 9 February 1867 into a God-fearing, relatively poor, and staunchly Orange family. Having left school at thirteen, he was for years an indentured apprentice in a linen factory until it was discovered that he was colour-blind and his indentures were cancelled. He then worked in a solicitor's office and took YMCA night classes, winning prizes for his Latin and Greek, before his mother 'scraped together enough money to pay for a coach' to enable him to matriculate at Queen's University, Belfast. Her dream was to make him a parson in the Irish Church. Instead, Douglas became private secretary to Sir Edward Harland, founder of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, who took the young man to London with him when he entered Parliament in 1889. Soon afterwards, Douglas married a woman from the same puritanical background as himself.   Douglas gradually made a name for himself in London's literary circles and became especially friendly with Swinburne, with whom he talked nearly every week. Given the sustained howl of moral outrage that had greeted the publication of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Douglas's admiration of the poet, like his ardent love of the theatre at this time, is hard to square with his subsequent apotheosis as the prude incarnate. The Douglas of this period come across as an altogether more fallible and appealing figure than the officious and overbearing smut-hound he would turn into. Although when Lord Beaverbrook was on the look-out for an editor for the Sunday News, it was less his emergent reputation as a prude that his established status as a cracker-barrel pundit for London Opinion and the Star that made him so attractive for the position.   Douglas announced his arrival as editor of the Sunday Express in an article of 14 March 1930 entitled 'Keen and Clean' in which he pledged that his newspaper would: "try to live up to that motto every Sunday, so that every household in the United Kingdom which desires a Sunday paper fit to be read by the whole family may order it without misgiving and read it without mistrust. . . I think there is a niche in the heart of the people for a popular Sunday journal which tries to keep the Sabbath holy without being dull, or priggish, or prudish, or Pecksniffian. In any event, Douglas's contributions to the Sunday Express could not have been more spectacularly 'priggish' or 'prudish', but 'dull' or 'Pecksniffian' they were not." One of Douglas's broadsides was aimed at Aleister Crowley. 'Some time ago', Douglas wrote in November 1922: "when our highbrows, or, as they are pleased to call themselves, our intelligentsia, were all praising. . . 'Ulysses,' I ventured to put in the pillory as the pinnacle and apex of lubricity and obscenity. But the praise of our highbrows had made it possible for a respectable published to hurl into the British home a novel which is modelled upon that scabrous outrage. There are two methods of dealing with pornographic fiction. One is to ignore it lest publicity should inflate its sales. The other method is to rouse public opinion so effectively that the book is either withdrawn from circulation by the publisher or is confiscated by public authority. . . . I have therefore determined to adopt the second method, and to do my best to secure the immediate extirpation of 'Diary of a Drug Fiend'. . . . It is a book that ought to be burned. Why lock up cocaine-traffickers if we tolerate cocaine novels?" Once again, however, Douglas had plumped for the wrong 'method' of dealing with a book he deemed objectionable. Before Douglas attacked it, The Diary of a Drug Fiend had been 'fairly widely and noncommittally reviewed' in the press, but, as was the case with The Flute of Sardonyx, Douglas's sensational account of it brought Crowley's book to far greater attention than a few literary reviewers could ever have done and it sold out its initial print-run.   Douglas's reviews of Crowley's book and other articles from the Sunday Express may be seen below: 19 November 1922 'A Book for Burning' 26 November 1922 'Black Record of Aleister Crowley' 25 February 1923 'New Sinister Relations of Aleister Crowley'

circa 1909   1929