Response to Joe and Michael:
I have long been given to understand that Douglas
was known as "Hugh" by his friends. Unfortunately, I never had the
pleasure of meeting him or corresponding with him personally. Nor did I
meet Dr. Tudor Jones. I did meet Dr. Basil Steele in the U.K. during his
Chairmanship of the Social Credit Secretariat. I never met Dr. Bryan
Monahan who resided in Canberra, Australia.
Joe's enquiry and comments are very interesting but
I can offer virtually no information in this regard. Douglas seemed to be
quite private about his personal background and information is sparse or
non-existant, especially about his early years. He was married twice and
had one daughter, supportive to his ideas, by his first
marriage. In his upcoming book John Hughes (recently deceased) elaborates
somewhat but stresses the paucity of available information. Douglas was
born on January 20th, 1879 the ELDEST son of Hugh Douglas, draper of Stockport,
Cheshire and his wife Louisa Hordern. From this information provided by
Hughes, Douglas must not have been an only child.
As is well-known, Douglas quite specifically did
not want any written biography about himself. His only daughter, Marjorie
(who resided in Scotland died a few years ago) was born by his first wife, Mary
Emily Constance Phillips of Hertfordshire. Douglas and his first wife were
married in 1904 but tragically, his wife died about eighteen months following
their marriage when Douglas was twenty-six years of age. He met his second
wife, Edith, in Sussex and in 1915 they married. There seems to exist
little background information on Edith, but apparently she was an
experienced engineer and successful businesswoman of intelligence, warmth and
charm. She accompanied Douglas on his world tour of 1934, was interested
in Douglas's ideas and supported his undertakings in this regard.
Douglas had an extensive career in engineering in
India with British Westinghouse, in Argentina with railway construction, in
Canada, etc.--and in construction of the London tube (subway) system where he
noted that work was often halted because of a lack of money when physical
resources were readily available. When in India a financial business
associate had given him long monologues on the nature credit which apparently
bored him at the time but, nevertheless, remained in his mind and became
significant at a later time when he began to develop his ideas which became
known as Social Credit.
His ideas on money, credit and economics came
at a later stage of his life when, as Assistant Director of the Royal
Aircraft Works in Farnborough he was asked to solve a costing muddle that
had arisen at that factory--and in the process, observed that the plant was
generating financial costs more rapidly than it was dispersing incomes.
After finding the same phenomenon in a large number of other British industries,
he produced his first written article, "The Delusion of Super-Production" which
appeared in the December, 1918, issue of the "English Review." His first work, "Economic Democracy" appeared in
1920 and was followed by numerous other books (e.g., "Credit-Power and
Democracy," "The Control and Distribution of Production," "Warning
Democracy," "Social Credit," "The Monopoly of Credit," etc.), essays,
addresses, debates and editorials in Secretariat and other Social Credit
publications such as the "New Age" edited by Alfred Orage and various other
venues, as well--including at least two broadcasts on the B.B.C., one being a
presentation on "The Causes of War" and another being the
"wireless" debate with Prof. D. H. Robertson.
Douglas (with his close colleagues) maintained the
Secretariat and it journals, first "Social Credit" and latterly "The Social
Crediter," continued to write on Social Credit throughout his
later life and, in order to counteract various tendencies toward distortion
of his ideas, produced in 1951 a "schematic" chart ("What is Social
Credit?") specifying the basic nature of Social Credit. He passed away in
1952.
Sincerely
Wally
Major Douglas -- f
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