Harold Alaric Jacob (8 June 1909-26 January 1995) was a British writer and Journalist, most active in the period 1940-1960. Jacob was born at Edinburgh, the son of Harold Fenton Jacob who was in the Indian Civil Service and at one time Political Agent in Aden. His mother was the daughter of a Danish missionary. As a child he spent time in India and Arabia but was educated in England at St Cyprian's School Eastbourne and The King's School, Canterbury. He rejected the prevailing ethos of his family and schools and decided he did not wish "to rule subject peoples". He left school as soon as he could and went to Paris. When he was 17 he wrote a play, The Compleat Cynic which was produced at Plymouth where he started his career as a journalist on the Western Morning News. At 21 he published his first novel Seventeen a fictionalised account of his schooldays in Canterbury. He was introduced to Sir Roderick Jones, the head of Reuters and was offered a position as diplomatic correspondent in London. In 1935 he went to Washington where he stayed until the outbreak of the World War II. He was in London until 1941 and then spent two years with the 8th Army in North Africa before going to India where he covered Wingate's first 'Chindit' expedition. After the first and second battles of El Alamein, he went to Russia as a war correspondent for the Daily Express. He was attached to the Red Army from the Battle of Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin and became sympathetic towards the soviet regime. He stayed in the Soviet Union, on and off, until the start of the cold war in late 1947. He then joined the BBC at the monitoring station at Caversham and ended up as a senior editor at Bush House when he retired in 1972. In 1934 Jacob married Iris Morley, daughter of Lieut-Col Chartres Morley. She was a historical novelist and jourmnalist for the Observer and the Yorkshire Post. She was a Communist and her ideas strongly influenced her husband. However he suspected that her membership of the Communist Party worked against him even when they were separated. When she died in 1953 he married again to the British actress Kathleen Byron. He had a daughter by his first wife and a son and daughter by his second wife. Paul Hogarth described Alaric Jacob as the quintessential English journalist; urbane, yet modest, with a bone-dry sense of humour and a razor intelligence. He possessed the grand manner of an Edwardian foreign correspondent with an Alan-Clark-like taste for vintage claret, a good cigar and fine brandy.
Publications
- Seventeen (1930)
- A Travellers War (1944)
- A Window in Moscow (1946)
- Scenes from a Bourgeois Life (1949)
- Two Ways in the World (1962)
- A Russian Journey
- Eminent Nonentities
In Scenes from a Bourgeois Life, an apologia for the paradoxes and anomalies of his career, he describes his family as having devoted itself selflessly to building the empire while lesser men stayed home and made fortunes from grubbier enterprises. As a result, he claimed, the Jacobses had little money and Alaric's father exhausted his meager financial resources sending him to an expensive school. Associating with the sons of families better off than his, he developed a deep resentment, believing that he would be unable to live the life of a gentleman which this education had led him to regard as his birthright. After a brief flirtation with British fascist Oswald Mosely's "New Party" he moved steadily to the left for the rest of his life, ending as a communist. He liked U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Americans in general he regarded with distaste as insufficiently civilized and the rise of American power displacing the British Empire in the world mortified him. On the whole, he preferred his idea of what the USSR was to America. Nevertheless, the autobiography contains many amusing tidbits, such as his account of losing his virginity to a bored married woman who invited him to her house to commit the act, but pulled him down the hall to a small guest bed at the last minute out of repugnance to enjoying him in the same bed where she slept with her husband; some philosophical reflections on how easy it is for an Englishman with the right accent to seduce American girls, especially since, he writes, American men tend to treat their women like chums and equals, whereas Englishmen know that women like to be treated like women. It appears that Americans had lots and lots of telephones in the 1940's and used their proliferation to play status games which annoyed Jacob.
