Francis Meynell

Sir Francis Meredith Wilfrid Meynell (12 May 1891 – 10 July 1975) was a British poet and printer at The Nonesuch Press.

He was the son of the journalist and publisher Wilfrid Meynell and the poet Alice Meynell, a suffragist and prominent Roman Catholic convert. After leaving Trinity College, Dublin, he joined his father at the publisher Burns & Oates. In 1913 he was brought in by George Lansbury to be business manager of the Daily Herald.

In 1912 he came to the notice of wealthy American, Mary Melissa Hoadley Dodge, who was domiciled in England. She knew Meynell's parents and had seen him speak in defence of activists of the suffragette movement in Queen's Hall. With her companion, Countess Muriel De La Warr, she provided support and funding for him in 1916 to start the Pelican Press and also helped with funding for the Daily Herald. In 1921 Meynell was editor of the weekly paper The Communist and became involved with a libel action that he lost. The award against him was £2000, and not being able to pay he filed for bankruptcy. Dodge and De La Warr came to his rescue but requested that their donation remain anonymous. Dodge became a godparent to Meynell's first child, Cynthia, in 1915.

Meynell was called-up for military service in 1916 and appealed on the grounds of being a conscientious objector. He appeared before a local tribunal in Marylebone in August 1916 and a national tribunal in September. He was granted exemption from combatant service only, and surrendered himself to the military authorities on January 29, 1917. He was held in the guard room at Hounslow Barracks and went on hunger strike. On February 11, 1917 he received a discharge from the army due to him being unlikely to become an efficient soldier. He returned to his work at the Pelican Press and the Herald.

Meynell was also a socialist who supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. His fusion of progressive politics and conservative aesthetic tastes, similar to those of William Morris caused some amusement amongst his friends; the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science notes that "he once set a left-wing propaganda pamphlet in Cloister Old Face and surrounded it with a border of 17th-century fleurons."

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