John Edgell Rickword

John Edgell Rickword, MC (1898-1982) was an English poet, critic, journalist and literary editor. He became one of the leading communist intellectuals active in the 1930s.


He was born in Colchester, Essex. He served as an officer in the British Army in World War I, having joined the Artists' Rifles in 1916, being awarded a Military Cross. He was a published war poet, and collected his early verse in Behind the Eyes (1921).He went up to the University of Oxford in 1919, staying only four terms reading French literature, and leaving when he married. He then took up literary work in London. He reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, which led to his celebrated review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Read more on Wikipedia

Jan Gabrial refers to her and Lowry meeting Rickword at Hugh Sykes Davies and Betty May's flat at Southill Gardens in a diary entry dated Sunday, October 29th 1933; "We are invited back for dinner tomorrow together with an ex-lover of hers (Betty May), Edgell Rickword. I wish Malcolm could be as relaxed as Hugh about these overlapping relationships." (Jan Gabrial Inside The Volcano Pg. 33).