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.

Life

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.