Person:Henry Andrews (19)

Maxwell (1894-1968) was educated at New College Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Roy Harrod; they were both members of the Eighty Club (in one occasion, Andrews is recorded to have responded to a toast to "the Liberal Party"). A banker, he married Rebecca West in 1930. Early in 1926, he was invited by Harrod to join the meetings of the Royal Institute of International Affairs' research group on cartels, of which Harrod was the secretary; later in the year, Andrews was listed among the "usual invitations".

Extract from Provincial Young-Ladyhood (Chapter): "I was less interested in the music than in the various contemporaries of Edward (Vera Brittain's brother) and himself whom Roland (Vera Brittain's fiancé) pointed out to me in the choir and orchestra. Of these I recall only one, Ivan Dyer, son of the general of Amritzar notoriety, but I missed an acquaintance of Edward's whom I had seen at the Old Boys' cricket match the previous summer, and Roland told me that this boy, Henry Maxwell Andrews - now the husband of Rebecca West - had left Uppingham in 1913. Henry Andrews, a slim, serious, very tall boy with dark, spectacled eyes, reappeared in my life ten years afterwards as a friend and New College contemporary of my husband. He seemed to me then to have altered very little since I saw him at Uppingham, and four years in Ruhleben - he had gone to Germany for the 1914 summer vacation, and was interned when war broke out - had developed in him a measure of kindness and tolerant wisdom considerably beyond the unexacting standards of the average Englishman."

"Rebecca West's husband Henry is placed against a background which involves Russian double-dealing in the early nineteenth century, the import/export business in Rangoon in the 1890s, and Germany at the outbreak of the First World War, when he was unaccountably interned in a camp which aimed to brainwash Easterners into spying on Britain after a German victory."

Quote from Rebecca West: "Then I had a short time of happiness on my own and a time of happiness with my marriage [R. W. married Henry Andrews in 1930], but then my husband got ill, very ill. He had meningitis, this thing that’s always struck at people near me, when he was young and then he got cerebral arteriosclerosis, and after years it came down on him. He was in a very unhappy state of illness for a good many years before he died, but we had a great many good years together. I was very happy."

Quote from Rebecca West: "She (Henry's mother) took her son [Henry Andrews] out with her to Hamburg and kept him too long. It was 1914 and the war came. Eventually she was sent back to England, but he was sent into a camp. He was there all through the war, in Ruhleben [the civilian POW camp at Spandau]. It was very sad. It did spoil his life, really. He was nineteen. It was very tough. But these young creatures were highly educated; he wrote quite clever letters to Romain Rolland."