I liked books about prostitutes, there were a good many then, and vividly recollect a novel called The Sands of Pleasure written by a man called Filson Young. It must have been well written otherwise I would never have remembered it so perfectly to this day. It was about an Englishman's love affair with an expensive demi-mondaine in Paris.
Jean Rhys

When she was a young girl in the West Indies Jean Rhys came across Filson's book in the local library. Writing her autobiography in old age she remembered it. Perhaps The Sands of Pleasure began the process that in the twenties and thirties took her too to Paris, where the Bohemian life she lived inspired memorable novels of her own.

Today nobody reads The Sands of Pleasure - and hardly anybody under the age of seventy has heard of Filson Young. In my family he was the legendary wicked uncle. We once set eyes on one another but as he died when I was one I don't remember the occasion. My mother's father Tom Young was Filson's elder brother, but though I lived in Tom's home until his death when I was nine, I don't remember him telling me anything about Filson. It was through the women of the family, half-repelled and half-fascinated by him, that the anecdotes came. My grandmother (Tom's widow) disapproved of Filson's irregular sex-life. No one could be quite sure whether he had been married once or twice, and as for other women - well, better pretend they never existed. Besides, she could never forgive his description of her bustling self: 'When you go for a walk with Agnes you have to run round the corners.' Stories abounded of his resourcefulness and arrogance. One day he was doing some research in the royal library at Windsor when King Edward VII came into the room. 'Who are you?' said the king. 'Filson Young,' came the answer, 'Who are you?' Or there was the time he was eating at a restaurant when the table manners of a man nearby began to irritate him. 'Waiter!' he is supposed to have called: 'put a screen round that table' He could always bluff his way past ticket-collectors and commissionaires to get into places where he had no business to be, and he was the sort of snob who would tick you off for saying 'maids' when you should have said 'servants'.

There was a shelf of books he had written in the glass-fronted bureau-bookcase that stood in my grandparents' drawing room and followed me from home to home down the years, but it was not until the early seventies that it occurred to me to read them. I was surprised by their variety and vitality. Fiction, war reportage, music criticism, book reviews, a complete guide to motoring from as early as 1904, an account of learning to fly in late middle age, a book on the Titanic published in the year the ship sank, and another on broadcasting from 1933, and - reprinted from newspapers and periodicals - volumes of personal essays or what today we would call newspaper 'columns' that threw light on his activities and personality. All this was expressed in a kind of purple 'fine writing' not likely to appeal to the less pretentious and more egalitarian age I had grown up in, yet the sheer energy of it all commanded respect. I determined to find out all I could about him. I spoke to the dwindling band of relations and friends who remembered him and tracked down people who had had professional dealings with him and advertised in the press for information. Those few to whom his name meant anything at all often remembered him in a fragmentary way: 'Oh yes he was the man who tried to get the BBC to broadcast the odds on horse-races, wasn't he?' or 'I shall never forget his book on the Titanic. A minor masterpiece'.

I spent weeks in the British Library's newspaper department at Colindale searching the crumbling pages in huge tomes of bound copies of the newspapers he had written for and studied old radio scripts and staff memos filed away in the BBC's written archives at Caversham. I had the eerie experience of hearing him speak to me in scraps of early radio broadcasts preserved on disc at Broadcasting House, and was just in time to save a long pink envelope full of newspaper cuttings and marked 'Young, Filson, Naval Expert, DEAD' which was about to be thrown out of the private files of the Daily Express. From an ancient handwritten ledger of payments to freelance writers I discovered exactly what he had written for the Manchester Guardian when all contributions were printed anonymously. From a university library in the USA came, on a single reel of microfilm made specially for me, over 750 letters that had passed between Filson and his publisher and friend Grant Richards, throwing light on the origins and fortunes of many of his books and giving clues as to the how and where and when of his reputed love affair with Richards' independent-minded wife.

Considering how completely his work has been forgotten, I was amazed to find again and again how highly he had been thought of in his own time. Before he was twenty-one he had not only published his first book but also an organ fugue which was accepted by the most famous music publishers of the day. When he wrote about music, a leading critic described his work as 'by far superior to anything yet produced by the English writers on music'. When he wrote a piece about going backstage at the pantomime and sent it to the Manchester Guardian not only its famous editor, C.P.Scott, but its owner too wanted him to become a regular contributor. When Scott sent him to South Africa to cover the march to relieve Mafeking he managed to be the first Journalist into the beleaguered town, and when his dispatches to the Guardian from South Africa were published as a book, Kipling was impressed enough to urge him to write stories.

Instead he left Manchester at the age of 24 and plunged into London journalism, simultaneously producing not only a book on Ireland said by one reviewer to contain descriptive writing comparable to the 'purple patches of the great masters of English prose', but also the book that hadn't existed when he had bought his first car, a comprehensive guide to cars and motoring that, suitably updated, was to be reprinted eight times.

Grant Richards now decided that Filson should give up London and journalism and go to live in a village in western Cornwall and write a novel; this coincided with the break-up of Filson's first marriage (to an officer's daughter he had met in South Africa), and Richards gave him paid work as a reader of manuscripts submitted to his firm for publication. The result of this arrangement was The Sands of Pleasure, which not only thrilled the young Jean Rhys in Dominica but shocked a puritanical Edinburgh bookseller so much that he burned it in public. The critics bracketed Filson together with E.M. Forster as one of the most promising young novelists in England, while The Sands of Pleasure made much­ needed money for both author and publisher.

After he was thirty success did not come to him so easily. The books that followed The Sands of Pleasure did less well and he went back to journalism, becoming in the years before the First World War an establishment essayist admired by Henry James, caricatured by Max Beerbohm and 'blasted' by Wyndham Lewis. In 1912 the essayist and novelist in him came together in what is in effect a documentary novel on the Titanic Richards made sure it reached the bookshops only 37 days after the ship sank, but it shows no signs of hasty writing and has been considered by some Filson's best book. Two years later James Joyce, as yet unknown, was disappointed when Richards failed to persuade Filson to write an introduction for the first edition of Joyce's collection of stories, Dubliners, which Filson had been one of the first to praise when the manuscript had reached him in his capacity as Richards' reader eight years before.

With the coming of war Filson by devious means attached himself to the staff of Admiral Beatty, then commanding the Navy's most exciting unit, the crack battle cruiser squadron in the North Sea. Early in 1915 he saw action with the battle cruisers at the Battle of the Dogger Bank and was lucky to survive. Soon after, a quarrel with Beatty lost him his place on the Admiral's staff, though they remained friends. He finished the war as special correspondent first for the Daily Mail and then for the Times in Spain and Portugal, where he ran up vast expense accounts entertaining VIPs and doubled as an Admiralty Intelligence agent whose job was to keep an eye on the movements of German agents and U-boats in and around the officially neutral Spanish ports. He started the twenties confidently with a new marriage (his second, and this one produced two sons), and writing up his naval experiences. It was another of his better books, With the Battle Cruisers (published in America as With Beatty in the North Sea). This combined an attack on Admiralty policy and methods with an eyewitness description of the Dogger Bank action as seen from a precarious perch in the crow's nest of Beatty's battered flagship Lion. The book was serialized in the Times, discussed in Parliament and praised by Winston Churchill, Conan Doyle and the Foreign Secretary (Lord Curzon).

All this publicity led to nothing much. By 1921 people were tired of hearing about the war and in any case did not like being told that those who ran the glorious Royal Navy might have been less than perfect. Returning to journalism again, Filson became editor of the weekly Saturday Review, a twenties equivalent of the modern Spectator, to which he had contributed regularly as a columnist for many years before the war. He greatly extended its arts coverage, among much else starting James Agate on his famous career as a West End drama critic and encouraging him to write what Agate later claimed as the first piece of serious film criticism to appear in the British press, its subject Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. Among Filson's other more memorably acts as editor was to accuse Conan Doyle of cheating at a spiritualist seance they had both attended. Doyle retorted: 'The only credulity shown by any of the company was our believing that you were a gentleman. This also you may publish.'

Sacked after two and a half years by a proprietor who resented being told by his editor that a proprietor's only function was to sign cheques, Filson approached Sir John (later Lord) Reith with a mass of ideas for the development of the infant BBC. Many of these were good ideas and for the last fourteen years of his life he was on the payroll as a programmes adviser and produced many programmes of his own, notably a series of religious folk plays from western Cornwall, a breakthrough--in regional broadcasting that was well ahead of its time. The Reith Lectures of today have developed from the BBC's National Lectures of the thirties which owed their existence to an idea of Filson's and to his conviction, often forcibly expressed in the Radio Times column he wrote every week from 1930 to 1936, that broadcasting should educate as well as entertain, a view shared by Reith. By the thirties his cultural elitism and mandarin prose were increasingly out of step with the times.

Nonetheless, despite failing health (not improved by an addiction to whisky) he threw himself with all his old vigour into new experiences. At 58 he learned to fly, giving a running commentary in a series of radio talks as he did so. In 1933 he annoyed Reith by prophesying in the Radio Times that the time would come when big sporting events like the Grand National and FA Cup Final would be televised; four years after this he was chosen to be the BBC's first television programmes adviser. Full of ideas, he could hardly wait to start, but heart failure killed him before he could do anything. He died bitter and disappointed. As early as 1909 he had written that it was his 'desolate habit not to be able to write otherwise than for publication'. He became convinced that he had never developed talents as a serious artist that were within him, and no amount of learning to fly and planning television programmes could make up for that.

Yet he had impressed people; when James Agate heard of his death he wrote in his diary: 'A man easy to misjudge: a man with something of the eagle about him'. Were those who praised his work in his lifetime wrong? Or did he produce masterpieces which we have unjustly forgotten? Neither, I suspect. Our lives are so short and crowded that a great deal that is interesting and worthwhile from the past must necessarily be put aside and forgotten, especially if it does not seem to connect with the fads and fashions of the moment'. Peter Green, discussing Filson"s contemporary A.A. Milne, once wrote: 'It will often happen that a minor talent, moving with the flow of contemporary opinion rather than against it, can, for that very reason, illuminate a period better than the independent creative spirit.' I'm sure Filson thought of himself as an independent creative spirit rather than a minor talent, but I think he would have seen the point. As with countless others whom time has passed by, it may do us good to recall him from oblivion if we can and get to know him. And it may be quite fun too.