Emile Cammaerts

Émile Leon Cammaerts CBE (16 March 1878 in Saint-Gilles, Belgium – 2 November 1953, Radlett, Hertfordshire) was a Belgian playwright, poet (including war poet) and author who wrote primarily in English and French.

Cammaerts translated three books by art, history and landscape expert John Ruskin and selected G. K. Chesterton Father Brown detective stories in La clairvoyance du père Brown.

He became Professor of Belgian Studies at the University of London in 1933, most of his works and papers are held there in the Senate House Library.

Cammaerts is the author of a famous quotation (often mistakenly attributed to G. K. Chesterton) in his study on Chesterton:

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.

Personal life

Cammaerts was born in Saint-Gilles, a suburb of Brussels. He was educated at the Free University of Brussels and later at the experimental Université Nouvelle where he studied geography. He migrated to England in 1908 and was baptised as an Anglican at age 34 (c. 1912) henceforth taking the middle name Pieter.

He married the Shakespearian actress Helen Tita Braun, known as Tita Brand (daughter of opera singer Marie Brema), with whom he had six children, including Pieter Cammaerts, who was killed while serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, prominent SOE operative Francis Cammaerts and Catherine Noel "Kippe" Cammaerts, an actress and mother of Michael Morpurgo. Jeanne Cammaerts (later Jeanne Lindley) collaborated with her father on Principalities and Powers (1947) and wrote his biography in 1962.