A WHITER FOB BOYS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIV, Issue 3, 3 January 1903, Page 4 (Supplement)

A WHITER FOB BOYS.

A SKETCH OF THE LATE G. A.

HENTY.

4 LONDON, November 21

Boys, old and young, have lost a friend by the death last Sunday of Mr G. A. Henty, on his schooner yacht, the Egret, in Weymouth Harbour, at the age of 69. No man was ever better equipped for writing tales of adventure, for he had roved widely and seen fighting with man and beast in almost every quarter of the globe. He began life not as a literary but as a military purveyor, and his first experience of war was in that capacity in the Crimea. After arranging the hospitals of the Italian Legion in Italy, he found the work of purveying in peace monotonous, tried mining at home and abroad, and then journalism. But his Pegasus refused to be fettered in Fleet-street, and when armies were raising their standards abroad, he left hi's "Standard" at home and began what was destined to prove a romantic sixteen year of roving as full of combats, escapes and adventures as one of his own stories. Volunteering in 1859 as special correspondent of the "Standard" for the Austro-Italian war, he accompanied Garibaldi in his Tyrolese campaign, followed Lord Napier through the mountain gorges to Magdala, and Lord Wolseley through bush and swamp at Kumassi. Next he reported the Franco-German war, starved in Paris through the siege of the Commune, and then turned south to Spain to rough it in the Pyrenees through the Carlist insurrection. He was in Asiatic, Russia during the Khiva expedition. Subsequently he made a tour of the mining districts in Western America, and, after accompanying the Prince of Wales on the Indian tour, with the Turkish soldiers in tie Servian war he looked on at some desperate hand-to-hand fighting in 1876. Then he thouht it was time to settle down quiet y at home, and divided his time betwen writing a trio of boys' stories every year for output at Christmas, and sailing in his yacht Egret. He was a keen yachtsman, and for many years had spent at least six months of each year afloat. Occasionally he raced, and more than once competed in the Dover to Heligoland sail for the Kaiser's Cup. He was for some time editor of the "Union Jack," and its mainstay through the first volumes. Big and burly, with a patriarchal white beard, great voice and bluff manner, he was transparently honest and sincere, and very outspoken in his views.

Since his first boys' book, "Out on the Pampas," made its appearance in 1868, he has always had a large literary constituency, which has ever since placed him at the top of the poll of boys' authors, and "With Buller in Natal," one of his latest, had a larger circulation than any of its predecessors. A "Henty" has always been a safe Christmas present, and all over the world boys are reading his last trinity, "With the British Legion," "With Kitchener in the Soudan," and "The Treasure of the Incas." He has succeeded in his aim "to teach history and encourage manly and straight living , and feeling among boys." His method was simplicity itself. When he had decided upon a subject he sent to the London Library for a batch of books dealing with the period, and read it up, cursorily rather than minutely—it was only when he had to write a page or two of absolute history that he was careful to be, in his own phrase, "absolutely unassailable." He dictated every word, and worked with such rapidity thai he sometimes produced a book of 140,00 Tvdrds in three weeks. He started? without any settled plot, allowing the story to develop naturally as it went on. His son, Captain Renty, of the Volunteer Company Royal Irish Rifles, has carried on his father's traditions in South Africa, being mentioned in despatches foi , his services during the -war.

The extraordinary literary productiveness of Mr G. A. Henty can only be gauged by a glance at the British Museum catalogue. Six closelyprinted pages are filled by the titles of his books. And they were nearly all turned out in a couple of decades—the eighties And the nineties. His earliest entry is 1869, -when he published a three-volume novel, "All but Lost." In the seventies he issued any books, but that was a decade of considerable fighting, which he witnessed as a war correspondent, and utilised at the time solely for journalistic purposes. Every part of the British Empire is represented in his breezy and buoyant tales of adventure, even countries like Australia and New Zealand, which he had never seen, but whose characteristics b,e had assimilated by diligent "cramminig."