13 Facts About Max Plowman

Mark Plowman, generally known as Max Plowman, was a British writer and pacifist.

Max Plowman left school at 16, and worked for a decade in his father's brick business.

Max Plowman later accepted a commission in the 10th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, and serving at Albert, close to the Somme on the Western Front, he suffered concussion from an exploding shell.

Max Plowman was arrested and tried by court martial on 5 April 1918 for refusing to return to his unit, his trial being covered in the Labour Leader.

In July 1918 Max Plowman gave a positive review in the Labour Leader to Siegfried Sassoon's anti-war poetry collection Counter-Attack.

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In 1930 Max Plowman joined John Middleton Murry and Richard Rees in developing The Adelphi as a socialist monthly; Murry had founded it in 1923 as a literary journal ; Rees edited it from 1930 to 1936, when he withdrew on account of Murry's commitment to pacifism, which increasingly became the magazine's theme; Murry resumed editorship until 1938, when Max Plowman took on the role.

Max Plowman sent Orwell books to review, founding an important friendship; and Rees was Orwell's literary executor.

Max Plowman later got to know Orwell better through Mabel Fierz.

Later that year Max Plowman introduced Orwell to Leo Myers, and set up a secret gift of £300 from Myers so that Orwell and his wife could travel to Morocco, to restore Orwell's health.

Max Plowman was attracted into organising for pacifism in the later 1930s by Hugh Richard Lawrie Sheppard.

Murry, to whom Max Plowman was now close, became a pacifist after a diversion into communism.

Max Plowman emphasised the importance of the individual conscience in an age of totalitarianism:.

Max Plowman was a member of the "Forethought Committee" in the PPU, which emphasised ruralcommunity living and humanitarian service as a means of coping with the war; other members included Murry, Wilfred Wellock, Vera Brittain, Canon Charles Raven and Mary Gamble.