H. G. Wells Society many years. It has also boasted a number of distinguished vice-presidents through the years including Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Foot, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest and Stephen Baxter. H. G. Wells Society There have been two groups called the H.G. Wells Society, both set up to support the ideas of Herbert George Wells (1866–1946). The first "H.G. Wells Society" was set up in 1934 to promote Wells' political ideas. Its members included Gerald Heard, Olaf Stapledon, Sylvia Pankhurst, Eden Paul and Vera Brittain. The group later changed its name to "Cosmopolis", then the "Open Conspiracy". In 1936 it merged with the
H. G. Wells PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN's refusal to admit non-Aryan writers to its membership. At a PEN conference in Ragusa, Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking. Near the end of the World War II, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, with Wells included in the alphabetical