Albert Powell Warrington was an attorney and banker who served as President of the American Theosophical Society from 1912-1920.
Background
Albert Powell Warrington was born in Berlin, Md. , the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls, of William and Emily Ann (Powell) Warrington. His father, a planter, was of English-Welsh-Scottish ancestry; his mother belonged to the Powell family of Virginia.
Education
After completing high school young Warrington become interested in the law and had studied under Prof. John B. Minor of the University of Virginia.
Career
He entered railway service, and by the time he was twenty-six years of age he had risen to the post of traffic manager of a southern railroad. In 1892 he was admitted to the bar and started practising in Norfolk, Va. Warrington became interested in Theosophy and joined the Theosophical Society in 1896. Not long afterward he met Mrs. Annie Besant, president of the society, and Charles Leadbeater, a close associate of Helena P. Blavatsky, its founder. He was retained by Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder of the society, as attorney in a case in Cuba involving a substantial legacy left to the society and spent a month there in close association with him. Thus Warrington came to know well the early outstanding leaders of the Theosophical movement. In 1911 he retired from his law firm, of which he had become senior member, and moved to Hollywood, Calif. , where he purchased a fifteen-acre tract and established a Theosophical settlement which he named Krotona. Designed, in Warrington's words, as "a quietist center for study and preparation for outer work, " it included the Krotona Institute, where courses were offered in Theosophy and related subjects. At Krotona, in 1918, Mrs. Christine Wetherill Stevenson, a Philadelphia Theosophist interested in the "little theatre" movement, presented an outdoor production of a dramatization of Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Its success led to the formation next year of the Theatre Arts Alliance, of which Warrington was one of the directors, and soon after to the building of the famous Hollywood Bowl. Krotona became the headquarters of the American Section of the Theosophical Society in 1912 when Warrington became its general secretary. After seven fruitful years in this post, he resigned and traveled extensively, lecturing in Australia, England, France, and India, much of the time in company with Mrs. Besant, whom Warrington greatly revered. In one of his personal papers he speaks of "her very existence as that of a goddess" to him. In 1924 the Krotona settlement was transferred, under Warrington's direction, from Hollywood to Ojai, Calif. Warrington was elected vice-president of the International Theosophical Society in 1928, and when Mrs. Besant fell ill in the autumn of 1931, he was called to headquarters at Adyar, India, where he remained working with her until her death on September 30, 1933. As vice-president, he succeeded her, serving as president of the International Society for nine months, until the election of George S. Arundale in June 1934. He then returned to Ojai, where he spent the remaining years of his career. Warrington died of pneumonia at his home in Ojai. His ashes were buried at Krotona - the settlement which remained as his monument.
Achievements
Personality
Warrington was slender and of medium height, with a well-trimmed Vandyke beard. Gracious of manner, he was a pleasing speaker, much in demand as a lecturer on Theosophy, to which he gave nearly thirty years of his life. His membership and activity in one of the minority groups, little known or understood by the majority, made it almost inevitable that his association was largely with his fellow Theosophists, but outsiders, both in Hollywood and Ojai, who came to know him respected him highly.
Connections
In 1892 he married Elizabeth Neely of Norfolk; to their union was born a daughter, Mary Neely. After the death of his first wife, he had married Mrs. Mary Corbin Balguy of London, England, in 1923. This marriage ended in a divorce, and in 1930 he married Mrs. Betty Stoner Robertson.