Herbert Douglas Fisher, the International Brigader from a famous family forgotten for eight decades

The intellectual aristocracy of late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain constitutes a Venn diagram of familiar names – the Stracheys and the Stephens, the Wedgwoods and the Darwins, the Keynes and the Trevelyans. These affluent, upper middle-class pillars of public life espoused a secular, liberal view of the world. Their depth of learning and keen sense of duty generated strongly held opinions on every aspect of science, culture and society. These were high profile members of the great and the good, equally at home in the Treasury or the London Library, Trinity high table or the Palace of Westminster. Neither by the early twentieth century was this a wholly male world: women writers and thinkers like Virginia Woolf drew deeply on the work of pioneering feminists like George Eliot and Philippa Fawcett. By the late 1900s Cambridge and Bloomsbury constituted the twin epicentres for these hard-working, well-intentioned and yet at the same time highly privileged scientists, scholars, artists and public servants. An unlikely outpost would be deep in the New Forest, for Brockenhurst was home to three generations of high achievers, all boasting a healthy respect for professionalism and for the power of the intellect: the Fisher family. The Fishers were a model of late Victorian patriarchy. Head of the household was Herbert Fisher, his first name passed down to son and grandson. Fisher was father to eleven children, almost all of whom made waves in later life...