Maggs Bros.

Dunsany took glee in tall tales and “abundant absurdity”, in life and in work. War, which for him included being wounded in Dublin street fighting during the Easter Rising and a spell on the Western Front, must have offered modest fuel for his absurdist tastes, but he was compensated when joining M.I.7B (I), the branch of the Ministry of Information (press liaison and propaganda) that dealt with food. As evidenced by this little archive, this backwater of the war effort allowed more opportunity for his fancy, and he gives a very entertaining account in his memoir Patches of Sunlight, (“Why have you not provided the information as to how many tins of marmalade your battery consumed during the preceding month?” “Because of the great war that is raging”.) MI7B (I) was well staffed with “characters”. It was headed by Peter Chalmers Mitchell, later to lead the London Zoological Society, there was the polymath Edward Heron-Allen, the writers J.M. Barrie and A.A. Milne, the detective writer Cecil Street, and the legendary journalist J.B. Morton, who in 1924 took over the “Beachcomber” column in the Daily Express. Under him it became one of the founts of modern English humour, and the strain of bizarre juxtaposition that he made his own may have had roots in the corridors of MI7B. Dunsany wrote that “J. B. Morton was another of us, and readers of his column over the name of Beachcomber will be surprised to hear that I often heard him talk good sense, as I often heard J. W. G. Tomkin talk good sense, an officer who sometimes visited us from further along the passage; and yet there must have been something in the conversation of each of them that blended badly with that of the other; for, whenever they met, the purest nonsense used to sparkle from them perpetually.”

Dunsany wrote in A Patch of Sunlight of the recipient of these letters: “We each had a room to ourselves, but there was also a library in which we could all meet, a room over which C. D. Stelling presided … I never knew exactly what Stelling’s work was; but I clearly remember the day when he made a remark about conditions in Austria, the details of which were so startling, that I knew at last that the end of the war must be near.” Stelling edited a celebration of M.I.7B called The Green Book, a book of legendary rarity.