Glimpses into a Literary Workshop: Frederic Whyte

Glimpses into a Literary Workshop: Frederic Whyte By His Son HENRY C. WHYTE Aseda, Sweden THE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Library contains a treasure of letters to my father from such diverse figures as Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Frank Brangwyn, Havelock Ellis, and G. B. Shaw. I have appended a list of noteworthy correspondents. My main purpose here, however, is to indicate the range of the collection by looking at the career of the man to whom the letters were written, Frederic Whyte (1867-1941). His activities as editor, translator, and author brought him into contact with a number of authors familiar to readers of ELT. Admittedly my second purpose is more difficult to achieve: to lay out available parts of a jig-saw puzzle which form his contribution to the literary world of the time and to glimpse the nature of a life in the literary workshop, one lived without great fame or affluence. My father was born at Surat in India, the son of Henry F. Whyte (a civil engineer building bridges for the Bombay & Baroda Railway Company) and Mary Comyn (her maiden name is my second name), who was of Anglo-Irish stock. In the draft notes of the first and only chapter of his autobiography, Childhood, humorously entitled "From My Zenith Downwards," FW says that from 1869, when he was two until he went to school he lived with his old grandmother and his mother's sisters, Margaret and Matilda Comyn, at Clarinda Park, Kingston (a suburb of Dublin). In the autumn of 1875 he was sent to Stonyhurst, where he boarded in Hodder House. His memory of his father is of a handsome, strong man with a brown beard. He had one elder brother, known in the family as "Uncle Jack," two younger sisters, May and Maude, and a number of cousins and relatives both in Ireland and in England. He kept in touch with his mother, brother, sisters, some of his Irish relatives, and a few of his English relations. I used to visit my maiden aunts and one or two relatives in and around London, but I never saw my paternal grand47 ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 parents, and family ties were not close. With the exception of my father and my uncle, who later became agnostics, the family was ardently Roman Catholic, and my father spent three years at Stonyhurst school (1875-1877). His education was continued at Burne/s, "that Gosport 'Royal Academy,' as it called itself, from which Lord Beatty and so many scores of other admirals passed into the Navy," as my father puts it in his semi-autobiographical A Bachelor's London, Memories of the Day before Yesterday 1889-1914.l However the Navy was not to be his line, partly owing perhaps to a leg injury sustained in a fall from a donkey while riding on the sands; he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. After a year at Beaumont College, he spent six months at a "pension" for boys in Brussels and then a few weeks at a school in Bruges to improve his knowledge of French and probably to broaden his mind. Such visits abroad were apparently not unusual. Conan Doyle spent a year in Feldkirchen in Germany probably for similar reasons; he also went to Stonyhurst school but left seven years before my father began there. My father completed his studies at "crammers" in London without notable results, but in 1887 at the age of twenty he obtained employment with Reuter's bureau as their correspondent in Constantinople under Dr. Siegfried Englander, who in the early stages, when this famous news agency was being built up some forty years earlier, was Baron de Reuter's right-hand man. This stimulating and remunerative assignment was only to last one year, however. As my father said, "In 1888 the Australian newspapers had decided that they could fend for themselves in the matter of European news and dispense with Reuter's telegrams. . . . This had meant a curtailment of its staff. . . . Hence the summary cutting short of my connection with it. . . ."2 I have in my possession off...