Amateur fraud?
Sir: Mr Ackroyd's article on Gilbert Murray (September 8) amateur fraud just will not do. Was Gilbert Murray a fraud? Well concludes Mr Ackroyd, yes, of course, in a way that is but a very lovable and pardonable way, teasing his friends and family with a few parlour tricks, forgivable surely in so great a humanist. While acknowledging this writer's laudable unwillingness to cast a libel on the dead . .. which after all is distinctly safer than libelling the living, the truth is that if Murray was a fraud then that fraud was anything but pardonable. It was no question of teasing his closest friends, Murray was twice President of the Psychological Research Society, a body that as Mr Ackroyd makes a point of saying is nothing if not thorough. It is a body that whatever one may think about its purposes contains a considerable number of the most honoured names in this country and that in every walk of life. It is the body that did not hesitate to reject the claims of Miss Moberley and Miss Jourdain to have wandered into the world of Queen Marie Antoinette which were later so eagerly swallowed by a very large public indeed, and though it has many enemies no one has yet doubted its good faith, integrity, or even perspicacity. It was on this body and the wider following it commands that Gilbert Murray is charged with planting a deliberate deception. Such deception of one's colleagues and fellow workers in the quest of an objective truth is pardonable in no one; the greater that man's reputation the worse the slur upon his name. Mr Ackroyd must face the consequences of his convictions. He certainly marshal's an impressive weight of evidence. Yet any barrister knows that in pursuing a particular brief it is never hard to bolster one's case with the weight of considerable evidence which is even more convincing when the Court has not yet heard the evidence for the other side.
To judge from Mr Ackroyd's summing up of the arguments for Murray's good faith that were published in your correspondence columns objectivity and factual accuracy would not appear to be his forte. No doubt he exercised much more of it in his examination of the Psychological Research Society's evidence than in his apportage of The Spectator controversy: What we are left with is the question why should Murray do it and could any man have done it.
The first Mr Ackroyd explains in a breezy way by saying he wanted some sort of relief from his classic studies. He does not seem to know'that Gilbert Murray was extremely active in National and International politics; he was a founder of the League of Nations Union, a pioneer of the Save the Children Fund, Liberal candidate and all but Liberal MP for Oxford University and a close friend of General Smuts, Lord Robert Cecil and pretty nearly every statesman who attended the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva. He was also, as every man who read his rendering of Europides must be aware, a poet and a scholar too; a rather rare combination. Hardly a man to need relief from boredom.
I have not sir had the time to sift the evidence, But I know as much as most men about a hoax seen by the hoaxer and I do aver from my own experience that it is not possible to maintain a masquerade and keep the secret to oneself (and least of all I should deduce from one's own family) for more than a month at the very most; certainly not for forty years and I call anyone who ever served in the Intelligence or the secret service to bear me out in that. One cannot sir, live with a lie for ninety years and take it to the grave. George Etlinger 4 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, WCI
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