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Anois agus arís - The sad Athens grave of an Irish policeman’s son
the PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS column
T.H. White (1906-1964) is recorded in most literary reference books as an “English writer, best known for The Once and Future King (1958),” a tetralogy based on the Arthurian legend.
The first film based on the opening book of his series, The Sword in the Stone, was an animated movie by Walt Disney released in 1963, but perhaps the story is better known in its colouful musical guise as Camelot (1967) starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave.
T.H. White was a sad and lonely man, yet his work has given pleasure to generations and inspired Lerner and Loewe to write the music for his story, which became one of the most popular musicals of the 20th century.
T.H. White once wrote a journal of a year’s travelling in England entitled Let England Have My Bones (1936). There is an irony here, for he was not born in England, nor were either of his parents English, and his bones now rest in a Greek cemetery.
On his grave, the inscription describes him as an “author who, from a troubled heart, delighted others, loving and praising life.”
Terence Hanbury White was born on May 29, 1906, in Bombay, India. His father, Garrick Hanbury White, a former Royal Irish Constabulary man from Co. Meath, had joined the Indian Civil Service and was then District Superintendent of the Bombay Police. The middle family name Hanbury is, of course, an Anglicisation of Ó hAinmhire, whose root means ‘levity’. It was a word that never described Terence.
His mother, Constance Aston, was the daughter of a Scottish judge. She was a possessive, self-absorbed woman, and Terence was later to blame her in very explicit terms for his alcoholism and homosexuality.
It seems that after Terence was born, Constance refused to have anything more to do with her husband, Garrick, and he turned to alcoholism and eventually their marriage ended in divorce.
Constance left India and took young Terence to England, where she placed him in a school in Cheltenham. He was always known as `Tim’ White, because of the well-known chain of chemists’ shops in England called Timothy White’s.
The boarding school in Cheltenham served to separate Tim even further from his mother. He went on to Cambridge and studied English at Queen’s College, where he obtained a first-class honours degree. He published his first volume of poetry in 1929.
At first he taught English at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire but, after four years, he resigned to attempt to earn a living as a writer. He had also developed an expensive hobby with falconry. He wrote two novels in 1932 under the name of James Aston, his grandfather’s name, First Lesson and They Winter Abroad. Darkness at Pemberley came out the same year under his own name. He published several more novels as well his journal; about the English countryside, England Have My Bones and numerous short stories.
He was then drawn to his father’s country in the late 1930s and settled in Doolistown, Co. Meath, where he began on the work that was to make him world famous. The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938, The Witch in the Wood in 1939 and the Ill-Made Knight in 1940. These three books were published in omnibus form for the first time in 1958 as The Once and Future King.
It was not until after Tim’s death that The Book of Merlyn, the unpublished conclusion to the tetralogy, was finally published in 1977. Tim remained in Co. Meath for the next ten years.
He was later accused of staying in Ireland during the war years to avoid being called up, but he claimed that he had tried to join the Royal Air Force in 1940 but was refused.
He wrote two more novels while in Ireland. Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) and The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947) which Brian de Breffny in Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopaedia insists should not be missed by anyone interested in satire writing.
At the end of the 1940s, Tim moved to Alderney in the Channel Islands. His productive work began to slow. He wrote some non-fiction and then his famous Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (1954).
But his alcoholism was having a devastating affect of his health. He had travelled to the United States to see the stage musical version of his book, Camelot, on Broadway with Richard Burton and Julie Harris in 1961. Three years later he was persuaded to return to the US for a lecture tour.
He returned to Europe on the SS Exeter, which made a tour of the Mediterranean calling at Barcelona, Naples, Egypt and the Lebanon. The ship began its return journey to the UK via Greece and on to Gibraltar. On the morning of January 17, 1964, it docked at Piraeus, the port of Athens. There was no sign of Tim White that morning. The cabin steward finally opened the door of his stateroom — No 109. He was found dead.
The ship’s surgeon wrote: “It is my opinion that the likely cause of death was acute coronary heart disease.”
It was decided that he should be buried the Proto-Nekrotafio, the first cemetery of Athens. The grave was near that of the Corkman, Richard Church, and former commander-in-chief of the Greek insurgent forces during the War of Independence against the Turks.
T.H. White’s grave is not so obvious as General Church’s. It is on the northern boundary of the cemetery, and almost a plain slab.
T.H. White, in spite of the sadness of his life, was a witty and erudite man with a deep knowledge of nature and possessing an affectionate rather than a bitter satirical attitude.
Forty years after his death, he is almost forgotten. Impermanence in the public memory is something all writers have to accept. I was lucky to have been given a copy of The Once and Future King when I was about 15-years-old. A copy of the book has always remained on my bookshelf. One day, I hope, people will forget the musical and return to the book, and the other works of Tim White, and appreciate that he was one of the literary giants of his day. Perhaps the lonely grave in Athens will no longer be deserted and forgotten.
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