Simon Watson Taylor (anarchist)

Simon Watson Taylor (15 May 1923 – 4 November 2005) was educated in England, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.^[1] He was a life-long anarchist,^[2] and a surrealist. He was also briefly a pataphysicist. However, became bored with the 'solemn black humour' of the pataphysicists.^[3] Consequently he rejected pataphysics and then became a hippie.

Watson Taylor's initial career was as cabin crew,^[4] which enabled him to travel the world.^[5] In the early 1940s he encountered in London surrealism, anarchism and pataphysics. In 1946, the surrealist review ‘Free Unions/Unions Libre’ which he had edited was published with the hands-on help of his anarchist friends Marie Louise Berneri and Philip Sansom. Between 1960 and 1971 he undertook editing work. In the 1960s and the 1970s he was a prolific translator of French literary works. When Watson Taylor became a hippie, he emigrated to Goa, where he enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle.^[6] From Goa he moved to an island off the Philippines, from which he eventually returned to England because of his ill-health.

In 1974 the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the United States acquired Watson Taylor's pataphysical and surrealist collection.^[7] The indexed collection is held in its McFarlin Library.^[8]

Watson Taylor was born to Felix John Watson Taylor and Lillian Elizabeth Tennant,^[9] after his two sisters,^[10] in Wallingford, in the historic county of Berkshire, England. His father was a member of an extremely wealthy family which had made its fortune in the sugar trade in the West Indies.^[11]

Watson Taylor had an unsettled upbringing which was related to his father's fraught relationship with the law.^[12] By the late 1930s the family left Wallingford and lived in several addresses in South East England, including Sussex. In 1940, they moved into a house at the top of Highgate Hill in London, which Watson Taylor described as having 'a panoramic view over the city'.^[13] In the following year he left home and moved to the fashionable Borough of Chelsea, where he roomed in various bohemian lodgings. Subsequently he became an actor, albeit briefly, which he solely attributed to his lack of talent. After settling down, he acquired a flat in Markham Square,^[14] off the King's Road in the Borough. George Melly, the English jazz and blues singer, who became a one-time flatmate and a life-long friend of Watson Taylor, visited him in his flat. Melly recalled:

'He was small but neatly made, full of aggressive energy fuelled by alcohol, controlled by discipline. He was dressed in a well-cut conservative tweed suit with an expensive shirt and tie. His eyes blazed with intelligence. His hair was short, cut en brosse by an excellent barber. His humour was icy. I found him impressive and rather intimidating.'^[15]

Watson Taylor was educated in England, and in France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.^[16] He appears to have only made one reference to his education, about a college that he attended in the mid-1930s.^[13] He recalled that it had 'attendant horrors' but three redeeming characteristics. The characteristics were its drama society, in which he claimed as having shone, its art class and the arts section of its library, which included a copy of the 1936 anthology Surrealism,^[17] which was edited by Herbert Read and which Watson Taylor described as having found exhilarating.

While Watson Taylor was living in Chelsea, he discovered Anton Zwemmer's bookshop in Charing Cross Road, which stocked the London Bulletin, an art magazine which was edited by E.L.T. Mesens the London-based Belgian art dealer and surrealist poet. In 1943 Watson Taylor joined the London Surrealist Group.^[18] The group held meetings during the war, initially each Wednesday evening in the private upper room of the Barcelona Restaurant in 17 Beak Street, Soho. The French painter Marcel Jean observed that the meetings were attended by painters, poets and writers, and that the latter group included Watson Taylor, the anarchist cartoonist Philip Sansom and George Melly.^[19] Jean further observed: 'Exquisite corpses and multilingual collective poems were enthusiastically composed on these occasions, and politics were a constant topic of discussion.'^[20] At some stage during his affinity with the group, Watson Taylor was asked to become the secretary of the English Surrealism Group.^[21]

By January 1941, Watson Taylor had become a member of his local branch of the Young Communist League.^[22] Consequently, he attended the rally in Trafalgar Square that had been called by the People's Convention, which he castigated as a ‘Stalinist Front’. While he was attending the rally, he encountered Marie Louise Berneri who was selling copies of War Commentary, of which she was one of the founders and one of its editors. Watson Taylor resolved to meet her the following day.^[23][24] Marie Louise Berneri was married to Vernon Richards, and was a close friend of fellow anarchists Philip Sansom and George Woodcock. Consequently, by meeting her Watson Taylor met them and became close friends with all of them.^[22][25] He also became, precise date unknown, a close friend of John Olday, the cartoonist of War Commentary, to whom he later wrote while Olday was imprisoned.^[26] Through them, Watson Taylor became aware of Express Printers of 84a Whitechapel High Street, in the East End of London, which the War Commentary collective had bought, and which printed not only the journal but also books and pamphlets. He concluded: 'Amid these libertarian surroundings my communist pretensions vanished without trace.'^[22]

Anarchist Stuart Christie recounted his personal experience of Watson Taylor while he was serving his eighteen-months imprisonment in Brixton Prison. Christie was one of the eight defendants, the Stoke Newington 8, in the criminal trial of The Angry Brigade which lasted from May to December 1972, in which he was eventually acquitted.^[27] He recalled that Watson Taylor regularly visited him in prison with expensive food parcels, at least one of which was a hamper from Fortnum & Mason. He described Watson Taylor as 'having the elegance and bearing of a Regency dandy' and observed that he 'carried a silver-topped walking cane on which his name was engraved.' Christie concluded his recollection of Watson Taylor with the following account of his benevolence. At the time of the trial of the Stoke Newington 8, Watson Taylor was in India. Nevtherless, he gave George Melly, who had been looking after his collection of surrealist paintings in his flat, permission to sell one of them to raise money for the Stoke Newington 8 Defence Committee.^[28] The sale of the painting raised about £10,000 for the committee.^[27]

In 1944, Watson Taylor inherited £2,000 from an uncle, which prompted him to consider the possibility of producing a surrealist review.^[22] His planned title was Free Unions/Union Libres, in homage to the love poem libre Union libre by André Breton, the French surrealist. Watson Taylor hoped that he would be able to obtain help from Express Printers. It eventually proved to be invaluable to Watson Taylor in two ways. It procured on the black market the high-quality paper that he wanted, and which otherwise would have been extremely difficult for him to procure.^[29] And it printed the review.^[30]

By the end of 1944, Watson Taylor had collated all the contents: prose text, poems and illustrations, that he needed for the review. All that remained was to receive the design for the cover that Birmingham-based surrealist painter Conroy Maddox had promised.^[32] However, then two unexpected related events occurred. First, early one Sunday morning, policemen from the Special Branch of Scotland Yard raided Watson Taylor's flat.^[22] Watson Taylor recounted that they were not interested in him but in his anarchist friend John Olday, who had written a Freedom Press Forces Letter which was sent to the subscribers of the anarchist journal War Commentary.^[33] The policemen didn't find John Olday in the flat. So they contented themselves with removing the mass of typescripts, photographs and artwork that Watson Taylor had been assembling for Free Unions/Union Libres that was on his desk and which were declared to be 'coded messages and as such not to be released.'^[34] Second, at the end of the year, the editors of War Commentary: Vernon Richards, Marie Louise Berneri, Philip Sansom and John Hewetson, were arrested by police officers, also from the Special Branch, on a charge of ‘incitement to disaffection’, ostensibly for distributing ant-war leaflets to soldiers at Waterloo Station who were about to entrain for embarkation to the Middle East.^[35] Watson Taylor stood bail for Sansom.^[36]

In July 1946, a policeman returned to Watson Taylor his typescripts, photographs and artwork. Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom had been released. And Watson Taylor had edited Free Unions/Unions Libres. Consequently, it was finally published with the technical assistance of Sansom and Berneri.^[37][38] Michael Remy (2019) observed: 'the review can be seen as a manifesto, produced in a communal spirit, and gathering anarchists (most of Taylor's friends, such as F.J. Brown and Philip Sansom) together with Trotskyists (Benjamin Péret, for example), so that it should constitute a conduit for surrealist tenets.'^[31][39] However, the review turned out to be its sole issue. Remy commented that it 'strikes a strangely unachieved, unfinished note.'^[40]

Watson Taylor sent a copy of Free Unions/Unions Libres to André Breton, in Paris. Breton was delighted with it. Consequently, Watson Taylor went to Paris to meet him, his friends and the members of the French surrealist group. However, a power struggle arose in Paris between two factions of the surrealism movement there, from which Watson Taylor disassociated himself. Shortly afterwards in 1947, The International Surrealist Exhibition was held in Paris, which was the last occasion for an appearance of the English group of surrealists.^[41] The appearance of the group comprised its contribution to a published work on surrealism which was entitled Déclaration du groupe surrréaliste en Angleterre. The Declaration was written by E.L.T. Mesens and Roland Penrose,^[42] and was signed by, among others, Sansom and Watson Taylor.^[43] American academic Paul C. Ray (1971) observed that the declaration was 'a tacit admission of the failure of the English surrealists to maintain any kind of productive cohesiveness',^[44] which he attributed to 'the individualism, the eccentricity even, of the English ... one of the reasons given eleven years later for the failure of the movement in England.'^[45] Ray also observed that the declaration concludes 'with a re-affirmation of devotion to surrealist principles as stated by Breton in his interview in View, his prolegomena to a third manifesto, his "Position of Surrealism between the Wars", and in Benjamin Péret's Le Déshonneur des poètes.'^[44][46]

After Watson Taylor severed his ties with surrealism, he subscribed to the tongue-in-cheek science of Pataphysics, and became a member of the recently created Collège de Pataphysique,^[47] which does not appear to have had a campus. Art historian Michael Taylor documented that by the end of the 1950s the members of the Collège included Watson Taylor and the leading American literary scholar Roger Shattuck,^[48] who later collaborated with each other as editors.^[49]

Watson Talor distinguished himself in the Collège by achieving the hypothetical status of Provéditeur-Délégataire, Régent de Brittanicité Faustrolliene et de Travaux Pratiques de Alcoölisme.^[50] However, he became disillusioned with it. And in 1968 he publicly signed off from it with an article entitled 'Alfred Jarry: the magnificent pataphysical posture' in the The Times Literary Supplement, which in turn prompted the Collège to pronounce him 'dead by resignation'. Initially and in contrast, Watson Taylor remained on excellent terms with the London Institute of Pataphysics, and declared himself 'delighted by its occasional investigations of what passes for "reality".'^[50] However, eventually he became bored with the 'solemn black humour' of the pataphysicists.^[51][52] He then discarded his suits, became a hippie and emigrated to Goa where he enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle. He then moved to an island off the Philippines, from which he eventually returned to England. He arrived in England peniless but was taken under the wing of Janet Menzel, who found him a bedsit off the Fulham Road and who looked after him until the day he died.^[53]

Watson Taylor's literary activities appear to have begun in 1944 when he had three poems published. However, his literary accomplishments began in earnest in 1960 and comprised translations of at least twenty French books and plays, most of which were published in London. Most of the books were about art and were published by the London firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. After 1966, his translations of books and plays were published in London by other publishers and in the United States, mostly in New York. He translated the book Paris Peasant (1971) by Louis Aragon the French surrealist poet,^[54] and the book Surrealism and Painting (1972), by André Breton. The plays which he translated included The Cenci (1969), by Antonin Artaud,^[55] and The Generals' Tea Party (1967), The Knackers' ABC (1968) and The Empire Builders (1971) by Boris Vian, and, with Cyril Connolly, The Ubu Plays (1968) by Alfred Jarry. George Melly, who once shared a flat with Watson Taylor, recalled: 'I can see him still in the flat at his work table, surrounded by reference books and dictionaries, and the results were impeccably researched and elegantly worded.'^[56]

In 1960 Watson Taylor was the guest co-editor with leading American literary scholar Roger Shattuck of a special issue (Volume 4, No. 13. May–June) of the American literary magazine Evergreen Review; titled What is Pataphysics?.^[57] In 1965, he co-edited with Roger Shattuck Selected Works of Alfred Jarry.^[58] In 1968 he edited French Writing Today which was published by Penguin. He was an editorial advisor and frequent contributor to the London-based magazine Art and Artists. And in 1971 he co-edited with Jamaican-born poet Edward Lucie-Smith a bilingual anthology, French poetry today.^[59]

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• Aragon, Louis (1971) [1926]. Paris Peasant. Cavaye Place, London: Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-25920-2. Retrieved 29 August 2025.
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• Stabakis, Nikos (2019). "Britain". In Richardson, Michael (ed.). The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. Vol. 1 Movements. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. ISBN 978-1-4742-2686-8. Retrieved 29 August 2025.
• Taylor, Michael R. (2017). "'The great hidden inspirer' Marcel Duchamp and surrealism in exile". In Taylor, Michael R. (ed.). Marcel Duchamp The Great Hidden Inspirer. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. ISBN 9783775743723. Retrieved 7 September 2025.
• Val Baker, Denys, ed. (1943). Litte reviews anthology. London: George Allen & Unwin. Retrieved 15 August 2025.
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• W, N; B, H (1986). "Marie Louise Berneri 1918-1949". Freedom. 47 (9): 25. ISSN 0016-0504.
• Watson Taylor, Simon, ed. (1969). French writing today (First Evergreen ed.). New York: Grove Press. Retrieved 20 August 2025.
• Watson Taylor, Simon; Lucie-Smith, Edward, eds. (1971). French poetry today. New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books. ISBN 978-0-8052-3426-8. Retrieved 26 August 2025.
• Watson Taylor, Simon (2002), Growing up with anarchists, surrealists and pataphysicians (PDF)
• Watson Taylor, Sonia (1947). "Letter from Jamica Religion and Progress" (PDF). Freedom. 8 (25): 3. Retrieved 4 August 2025.
• Woodcock, George (1994). "Skoal to Drunken Boat". Drunken Boat. 2: 283–288. Retrieved 29 August 2025.