Archibald Robertson (atheist)

Archibald Horace Mann Robertson (1886–14 October 1961) was an English civil servant who became a writer on history, social affairs from a left-wing perspective and critiques of Christianity.

Robertson was born in Durham in 1886, eldest of the three sons of the similarly named Archibald Robertson and his wife Julia, née Mann. The father was an Anglican clergyman and the master of Hatfield College, Durham, who later became Principal of King's College, London and then Bishop of Exeter.

In 1899 Robertson won a scholarship to Winchester College, where it was that he began to doubt the Christian and Tory orthodoxies which were expected of him. This process started with his reading of the history of the French Revolution. Further spurs to his thinking came from Shelley's Queen Mab with its "devastating notes", J. W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and, most of all, Belfort Bax's The Ethics of Socialism.

From school he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he was in due course awarded a first-class degree in Greats. Meanwhile, he continued his political interest. The 1906 General Election, a landslide victory for the Liberals and the first substantial representation for the Labour Party, took place shortly after he started at Oxford. He avidly read left-wing periodicals such as The Clarion, Labour Leader, The New Age and Justice, the weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation. He became a regular contributor to at least the last of these, (using the style A. H. M. Robertson)

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