Simon Watson Taylor (15 May 1923 – 4 November 2005) was an English intellectual who was born in Wallingford, in the historic county of Berkshire. He was briefly a poet and an author. But he was mostly a professional translator of French literature who also undertook editing. He initially subscribed to communism and then to surrealism. He subsequently subscribed to anarchism, upon which he rejected communism, after which he adopted pataphysics. However, upon becoming bored with pataphysicists, he rejected pataphysics and became a hippie.
Early life Watson Taylor was born on 15 May 1923 to Felix John Watson Taylor and Lillian Elizabeth Tennant, See also George Watson-Taylor. after his two sisters, in Wallingford, in the historic county of Berkshire. His father was a member of an extremely wealthy family which had made its fortune in the sugar trade in the West Indies.In 1947 his surviving sister Sonia had her sympathetic article about Jamaica article published in the anarchist newspaper Freedom, see .
Watson Taylor had an unsettled upbringing because of his father's fraught relationship with the law.Capt Felix John Watson Taylor, R Wilts By the late 1930s the family had left Wallingford and lived in several short-stay addresses in South East England, including Sussex. Watson Taylor's education reflected the changing domiciles of his family. According to one account he was educated in England, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In contrast, according to a biography of him dated 29 August 1945 which was written by the Special Branch, he was educated in Switzerland.Special Branch biography of Simon Watson Taylor (1945). By his own admission, during the mid-1930s he attended a college that was deemed 'progessive' and which had received a charter that had been granted by Elizabeth I. He recalled that, while he was in its upper sixth form, he enjoyed 'annoying the teachers and his fellow students ... by sporting the lapel-pin of the YCL (Young Communist League) on [his] blazer.' Watson Taylor also recalled that, while the college had 'attendant horrors', it also had three redeeming characteristics: its drama society, in which he claimed as having 'shone', its art class, and the arts section of its library, which included a copy of the 1936 anthology Surrealism,Surrealism was republished in 1971 in England and in the United States, see . which was edited by Herbert Read and which Watson Taylor described as having found exhilarating.
In 1940, Watson Taylor's family moved into a house at the top of Highgate Hill in London, which he described as having 'a panoramic view over the city'. In the following year he left home and moved to the fashionable Borough of Chelsea, where initially he roomed in various bohemian lodgings. Subsequently Watson Taylor acquired a flat in Markham Square,. off the King's Road, where he became a member of the bohemian Chelsea set. He first became an actor with various companies, starting with the Regent%27s Park Open Air Theatre, followed by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and other companies.A footnote to his 1947 article, “Here’s another fine mess!” A dissertation on Laurel and Hardy – the ambassadors of the dispossessed (), described him as 'recently been touring the Middle East with a theatrical company.' recalled that Watson Taylor toured weekly 'to entertain the same troops the anarchists were trying to disaffect.' However, he described his career as an actor as 'fairly brief', which he attributed to his lack of single-minded devotion to theatre and his probable lack of sufficient talent. He then worked in a factory. And eventually he worked as a flight attendant for BOAC, which enabled him to travel internationally. On one occasion, having travelled to New York, he met the two beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who subsequently stayed in his flat.
Surrealism and anarchism While Watson Taylor was living in Chelsea, he discovered Anton Zwemmer's bookshop in Charing Cross Road, which stocked the London Bulletin, an art magazine which was edited by E.L.T. Mesens the London-based Belgian art dealer and surrealist poet. Consequently, he met the members of the London Surrealist Group who, during the war, held meetings, initially each Wednesday evening, in the private upper room of the Barcelona Restaurant in 17 Beak Street, Soho.
Shortly afterwards, by January 1941, Watson Taylor had become a member of his local branch of the Young Communist League. Consequently, he attended the rally in Trafalgar Square that had been called by the People's Convention, which he castigated as a ‘Stalinist Front’. While he was attending the rally, he encountered Marie Louise Berneri who was selling copies of War Commentary, of which she was one of the founders and one of its editors. Having fallen in love with Berneri, recalled that Watson Taylor told him that he had fallen 'in love with a beautiful girl of Italian birth and discovering that she was an anarchist, he became one overnight.'Towards the end of his life recalled Berneri's 'radiantly beautiful face, Latin features, black hair and eyes, olive skin'.Fellow anarchist Colin Ward recalled, in a different context, 'of course everyone fell in love with Marie Louise.' (Italics in the original) Ward in . He continued: 'She is, I think, the most beautiful girl I ever saw ....' . Watson Taylor resolved to meet her the following day. Berneri was married to Vernon Richards, who owned Express Printers in Whitechapel, and was a close friend of fellow anarchists Philip Sansom and George Woodcock. Consequently, by meeting her, Watson Taylor became close friends with all of them. recalled: He also became, precise date unknown, a close friend of John Olday, the anarchist revolutionary and cartoonist of War Commentary, to whom he later wrote while Olday was imprisoned. documented that the correspondence between Watson Taylor and John Olday is held in the National Archives, in Kew in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Reference number: KV 2/3599. Through his new friends, Watson Taylor became aware of Express Printers in 84a Whitechapel High Street, in the East End of London, which he described as being owned by Richards, and which printed not only the journal but also books and pamphlets. He concluded: 'Amid these libertarian surroundings my communist pretensions vanished without trace.'
In 1945, Watson Taylor became the secretary of the London Surrealist Group. In the following year, George Melly, the English jazz and blues singer, having become converted to surrealism, sought out the Group. When he did so, he was invited to visit Watson Taylor in his flat. Melly recalled:
Watson Taylor and Melly were to become life-long friends.
Free Unions/Union Libres In 1944, an uncle left Watson Taylor an inheritance of £2,000 (), which prompted him to decide to produce a surrealist review. His planned title for it was Free Unions/Union Libres, in homage to the love poem libre Union libre by André Breton, the French writer and poet, and co-founder of surrealism. Watson Taylor hoped that he would be able to obtain help from Express Printers. Its help could be invaluable because it could obtain the high-quality paper that he wanted which otherwise would have been extremely difficult for him to procure.See the entry for 'Paper' in Rationing in the United Kingdom And of course it could print the review.
By the end of 1944, Watson Taylor had collated all the contents that he needed for the review, including prose text, poems and illustrations. All that remained was to receive the design for the cover that Birmingham-based surrealist painter Conroy Maddox had promised. However, then two unexpected related events occurred. First, early one Sunday morning, policemen from the Special Branch of Scotland Yard raided Watson Taylor's flat. Watson Taylor recounted that they were not interested in him but in John Olday, who had written a Freedom Press Forces Letter which was sent to the subscribers of the anarchist journal War Commentary.Silvano Levy, a British academic specialist on surrealism, observed that the raid followed a raid of the studio of Olday, who, he conjectured, had 'carelessly written Watson Taylor's telephone number' on a wall of it. () The policemen didn't find Olday in the flat. Instead they found a mass of typescripts, photographs and artwork that Watson Taylor had been assembling for Free Unions/Union Libres that was on his desk which they took away for further inspection as 'potentially subversive anarchist propaganda' and which were later declared to be 'coded messages and as such not to be released'. alternatively claimed that the police removed the poems, drawings and articles for the review from the premises of Freedom Press.The Special Branch wrote a biography of him, Special Branch biography of Simon Watson Taylor (1945). Second, at the end of the year, the editors of War Commentary: Richards, Berneri, Sansom and John Hewetson, were arrested by police officers from the Special Branch on a charge of ‘incitement to disaffection’, ostensibly for distributing ant-war leaflets to soldiers at Waterloo Station who were about to entrain for embarkation to the Middle East. documented in detail the events which led up to the trial and the trial itself. Watson Taylor stood bail for Sansom.. confirmed that Watson Taylor had stood bail for Sansom. In contrast claimed that Watson Taylor stood bail for the editorial collective of Freedom. The bail was set at £1,000 (Radical reprint: Defence of four London anarchists). All the editors apart from Berneri were jailed for nine months, despite the valiant attempts that Watson Taylor made in his capacity as the treasurer of the Freedom Press Defence Committee.Freedom Press.No evidence has been encountered to support the claim that made that Watson Taylor was the Secretary of the Group.
In July 1946, a policeman returned to Watson Taylor his typescripts, photographs and artwork. Richards and Sansom had been released. And Watson Taylor had edited Free Unions/Unions Libres. Consequently, the review was finally printed with the technical assistance of Sansom and Berneri. documented in detail the work that Sansom needed to undertake. observed that the inside of the cover included an acknowledgement that the review had been published with 'the assistance with typography and lay out by M.L. Berneri and Philip Sansom'. It was a 48-page bilingual publication which comprised forty-eight contributions from various authors.The catalogue of the Morgan Library %26 Museum in New York contains a detailed entry for its copy of the review, see Free unions - Unions libres / editor Simon Watson Taylor. Marcel Jean, the French surrealist, described it as follows:
Michael Remy (2019) observed: 'the review can be seen as a manifesto, produced in a communal spirit, and gathering anarchists (most of Taylor's friends, such as F.J. Brown and Philip Sansom) together with Trotskyists (Benjamin Péret, for example), so that it should constitute a conduit for surrealist tenets.'F.J. Brown was a contributor to the monthly magazine Our time, which was 'a monthly magazine presenting the Communist interpretation of art and literature.' . However, the review turned out to be its sole issue. Remy commented that it 'strikes a strangely unachieved, unfinished note.'