26 - R.V.C. Bodley (‘Bodley of Arabia’) (1892-1970): Soldier, Adventurer, Journalist and Writer in Japan, 1933–1934

Summary

BEFORE GOING TO JAPAN

RONALD COURTENAY BODLEY'S father was the barrister and Oxford historian John Edward Courtenay (J.E.C.) Bodley (1853–1925), author of France (1898) and a descendent of Miles Bodley, brother of Sir Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), ambassador of Elizabeth I and founder of the Bodleian Library. Called to the bar at the age of twenty-one, John Bodley later became private secretary to the Liberal and reformist politician Sir Charles Dilke (1843–1911), although his career came to an end when Dilke was involved in a divorce scandal in 1885. In 1891 he married Evelyn Frances, the daughter of John Bell of Rushpool Hall, Yorkshire, and they had two sons: Ronald Victor Courtenay, and the future artist Josselin Reginald Courtenay Bodley (1893–1974), and a daughter, Ava (1896–1974).

Ronald Victor was born in Paris on 3 March 1892. As the author himself put it: ‘I was born on a raw March afternoon in Paris, the city of the glorious unforeseen, the centre of beautiful nonsense and of the grimmest reality.’ Educated at Eton, he was a contemporary of Osbert Sitwell and Aldous Huxley (and the Irish-born diplomat and writer Shane Leslie, later Sir John Randolph Leslie (1885–1971) who would subsequently write favourable reviews of his books). Instead of following in his father's footsteps and going to Oxford he chose a military career, one which he himself acknowledged to have been against his temperament. After attending the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst he was commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps and spent three years in India ‘where I played polo, and hunted, and explored in the Himalayas as well as doing some soldiering’ before the outbreak of the First World War. A lieutenant in the 60th Rifles in September 1914 he served in France where, in 1917, he suffered a breakdown as a consequence of being gassed. Bodley recorded this time in his memoir Indiscretions of a Young Man, published in 1931. He apparently reached the rank of colonel while in France, but in later life stylized himself as either ‘Major’ or ‘Colonel’ Bodley.

Bodley married Ruth Mary Elizabeth Stapleton-Bretherton (15 March 1897–1956) in April 1917.