Philip Mairet

Philip Mairet (French: [mɛʁɛ]; full name: Philippe Auguste Mairet; 1886–1975) was a designer, writer and journalist. He had a wide range of interest: crafts, Alfred Adler and psychiatry, and Social Credit. He was also a translator of major figures including Sartre. He wrote biographies of Sir Patrick Geddes and A. R. Orage, with both of whom he was closely associated.

Although influenced largely by the example of Orage, a follower of Gurdjieff, Mairet was in later life an Anglican Christian. As editor of the New English Weekly in the 1930s, he championed both Christian socialism (in the sense of Maurice Reckitt, a friend), as it was known at the time, and ideas on agriculture that would come together later as organic farming.

He was educated at the Hornsey School of Art, becoming a draughtsman and designer of stained glass. As a young man he worked in graphic design for Charles Robert Ashbee. When Ashbee re-designed the Norman Chapel House in Broad Campden he used Mairet to do the drawings. This house was for his future wife who at the time was married to Ananda Coomaraswamy. Mairet became part of the community at Chipping Campden, and illustrating Conradin: A Philosophical Ballad (1908). He then worked for Patrick Geddes.

His wife Ethel Mairet was older than him. She had previously been married to Ananda Coomaraswamy) and she became an influential weaver and teacher. Her marriage to Coomaraswamy had lasted from 1903 to 1913. Philip had come to Ditchling to work as a labourer. He was avoiding conscripted military service during World War I, and developed an interest in glass-making. He was at that time influenced by Dimitrije Mitrinović, attached to the Serbian Delegation in London, who met Mairet in 1917. Eventually Mairet was discovered, enrolled in the British Army, and spent a period in prison.

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