Michael J. Connolly
Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture.
In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older British officers preserved in Boer War amber, overweight, sporting droopy walrus moustaches, and pontificating in an over-the-top Tory reactionary manner that bemoaned the Empire’s decline since Queen Victoria. “Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right,” a towel-clad Blimp declares in a London club sauna. “We must refuse to take part in another world war unless arrangements are made to hold it in the British Empire.” In another, “Gad, sir, Lord Reverbeer is right. We should explain to the natives in India that British troops are there only to protect them from massacre, and if they don’t accept that then shoot ‘em all down.” Blimpish characters thereafter became a staple of British culture. One thinks of Lord Henry Ames in Michael Palin’s droll 1982 film The Missionary, where his Lordship declares, “I once had a chap before me who’d been caught stealing from the mess. I ordered every alternate fingernail to be removed, and you know, I still get a card from him every Christmas.” Or alternately, “You see, what I think is wrong with the country today is that there aren’t enough people chained up.” Or again, writing a complaining letter and asking Lady Ames, “Are there two ‘ls’ in “disembowelment?” Blimp’s character was meant as critical satire, of course, mocking pig-headed establishment elders blind to Hitler’s rise, but the rotund colonel soon became a sympathetic figure, since everyone recognized in him the aging veteran of every community due more respect than mockery. His fullest redemption came in the 1943 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/04/colonel-blimp-old-right-hoffman-nickerson-michael-j-connolly.html