George Cecil Ives (1 October 1867 in Frankfurt, Germany – 4 June 1950 in Hampstead/Middlesex, Great Britain) was an English poet, writer, penal reformer and early homosexual law reform campaigner.
Life and career
Ives was the illegitimate son of Gordon Maynard Ives (1837–1907), an English army officer, and Jane Violet Tyler (1846–1936). He was brought up by his paternal grandmother, Emma Ives, with whom he lived between Bentworth in Hampshire and the South of France. Ives met his birth mother only twice and had a fraught relationship with his father.
Ives was educated at home and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he started to amass 45 volumes of scrapbooks (between 1892 and 1949). These scrapbooks consist of clippings on topics such as murders, punishments, freaks, theories of crime and punishment, transvestism, psychology of gender, homosexuality, cricket scores, and letters he wrote to newspapers. His interest in cricket led him to play a single first-class cricket match for the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1902.
Ives was a member of the Humanitarian League, a radical advocacy group, which operated between 1891 and 1919.
Ives met Oscar Wilde at the Authors' Club in London in 1892. Ives was already working for the end of the “oppression” of homosexuals, what he called "the Cause." He hoped that Wilde would join "the Cause", but was disappointed. In 1893, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair, introduced Ives to several Oxford poets whom Ives also tried to recruit.
By 1897, Ives founded the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC. The society held occasional meetings in London and provided a venue for the Uranian poets and writers to meet each other and keep in touch. Members included Charles Kains Jackson, Samuel Elsworth Cottam, Montague Summers, and John Gambril Nicholson.
The same year, Ives visited Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe. This marked the beginning of their friendship.
In 1911 Ives was living at 196 Adelaide Road, London. He employed his life-long friend James Goddard (born 1868 Bentworth, Hampshire) as his valet. Goddard's wife and children were also employed by Ives during their lifetimes.
In 1914, Ives, together with Edward Carpenter, Magnus Hirschfeld, Laurence Housman and others, founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. He also kept in touch with other progressive psychologists such as Havelock Ellis and Professor Cesare Lombroso. The topics addressed by the Society in lectures and publications included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex and a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct; problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilisation, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. In 1931, the organisation became the British Sexological Society. Ives was the archivist for the Society, whose papers were purchased by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (at which point they left the UK).
Ives also visited prisons across Europe and specialised in the study of penal methods, particularly those of England. He lectured and published books on the topic.
Death
He died in 1950, aged 82, in London. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. He expressed a wish in his will that "No Jewish or Christian Texts or Emblems shall be placed on my tomb."
The Ives papers
At his death in 1950, George Ives left a large archive covering his life and work between 1874 and 1949. The papers were bought in 1977 by the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They have been divided into four sections as follows:
I. Correspondence, 1874–1936
This section contains invitations and letters regarding Ives' writings and lectures on prison reform, sodomy, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and other topics. Ives' correspondents include Adolf Brand, Oscar Browning, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Norman Gale, Augustus Hare, Ernest Jones, Cesare Lombroso, Charlotte Maria North, Reggie Turner and Edward Westermarck.
II. Works, 1897–1937
This section groups examples of Ives' published works, lectures, notes and samples of verse, both as typescripts and holographs. The topics represented include: prison reform, crime and punishment, historical views of sexuality, religion.