Bertrand Russell Dies, Aged 97

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32213, 4 February 1970, Page 19

Bertrand Russell Dies, Aged 97

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter and other sources) LONDON, Feb. 3. Bertrand Russell, who died last night at the age of 97, communicated his controversial views on a tremendous variety of subjects to comnion people the world over.

To the end he was dedicated to campaigning against evil in all forms. He died at his home, Plas Penrhyn, Penrhyndeudraeth, in North Wales, not far from where he was born on May 18, 1872. Lord Russell, who succeeded to the title of the 3rd Earl Russell in 1931, had been suffering from influenza.

His outspoken opinions on sexual behaviour, nuclear arms, war discrimination, politics, economics, and other topics put him in constant opposition to authority. He was a mathematician, a philosopher, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, pamphleteer, a radio and television broadcaster, holder of the Order of Merit (one of Britain’s highest awards), and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Lord Russell, a lean, spare figure with a shock of white hair, was compared to Voltaire, the eighteenth century French philosopher and writer, for his sharp wit, his championship of individual liberty and his rejection of religion. He advocated Christian love and compassion but called himself sometimes an agnostic; at others an atheist. Because of his pacifism and genera! concern with the

dition of humanity, a number of people believed that his views were shifting towards Christianity. He clarified his attitude to religion in a book called “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

His energy did not flag and less than two months before his death he was writing to the Soviet Prime Minister (Mr Alexei Kosygin) to protest over the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Writers’ Union. His ancestors were Dukes of Bedford and his grandfather, Lord John Russell, was Prime Minister of Britain. His parents had died by the time he reached the age of three and he was brought up by his grandparents. Educated privately, he won a scholarship to Trinity College. Cambridge, where many of the formative influences of his life made themselves felt. He took a first-class degree in mathematics and moral sciences and began to write the first of the more than 40 books he was to publish. “Principia Mathematica,” in which he collaborated with Alfred North Whitehead, took him three years of constant hard work from 1907 to 1910. During his six months in prison in 1918 he wrote one of his most brilliant works, “An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.” In 1908, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, one of England’s highest bodies dedicated to advanced knowledge. He also interested himself in the radical Fabian Society, the free-trade movement and women’s suffrage. In 1910, while a lecturer in logic and the principles of

mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Russell sought to stand for Parliament as a Liberal. The party turned him down because he was a freethinker. He was to stand as a Labour Party candidate three times, none successfully. In 1965, after 51 years as a supporter of the Labour Party, Lord Russell publicly tore up his party membership card in protest against the British Government’s attitude towards the Vietnam war. Before the First World War he conducted a lecture series at Harvard. On his return to Britain he entered the antiwar movement. “I could not feel that the victory of either side would solve any problem,” he said. He was fined £lOO in 1916 for issuing a pamphlet protesting against the sentencing of a conscientious objector. His college removed him from his lectureship and in 1918 he was prosecuted for an article casting aspersions on the American

Army and sentenced to four months in Brixton prison. After the war his interest in politics drove him to Russia where he spent five weeks in 1920 and met Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky. Shortly before the Second World War Russell went to the United States to lecture at the University of Chicago and then in the University of California. In 1940 he accepted a professorship in New York City College. Several religious organisations, a section of the press, and the City Council denounced him as “an enemy of religion and morality.” His appointment was invalidated as a result of a taxpayer’s suit brought against it by a Brooklyn housewife. Attempts were also made to oust him from Harvard, where he gave lectures in 1940. Later, he signed a fiveyear contract to lecture at the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. When he was dismissed in 1942 he sued the foundation and won 820,000 for breach of contract.

When he returned to England in 1944 his old college, Trinity, under the mastership of G. M. Trevelyan, offered him a fellowship with the widest possible terms, to lecture, or not, as he pleased, while he continued his academic studies. He accepted the fellowship and returned to the college from which he departed during the First World War.

Stalin’s oppression of the Kulaks and the rise of Hitler had converted Russell from the pacifism he had preached for so long. Lord Russell, When almost' 90, was again imprisoned, this time for sitting in the road

■ —he was always a champion of civil disobedience—to : further his ideas. His fierce antagonism to i the Vietnam war led him to set up in 1967 the “International War Crime Tribunal” on the American role in the 1 conflict. It eventually met in ' Stockholm after Lord Russell had said that the French and British governments had refused it permission to sit in Paris or London. Lord Russell, was married four times, the last time to an American writer, Edith Finch, in 1952. In his later years he sometimes was described as “proCommunist” or “anti-Ameri-can,” but a series of broadcast lectures in 1968 were described by Moscow as “the howling of a wolf.” He was later fiercely critical of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and took up with his habitual fervour the positions of Jews in the Soviet Union. In his eighties and nineties, his efforts in the cause of preventing a nuclear holocaust took up much of his time. President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he resigned from the organisation over the issue of civil disobedience and became a member of the militant Committee of 100. In the first volume of his autobiography published in 1961, he summed up his views in the following words ‘Three passions, simply but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life—the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind! I These passions,, like great! winds, have blown me hither I >1 and thither over a deep ocean. II of anguish.”