NOVELIST’S DEATH

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20570, 2 June 1941, Page 5

NOVELIST’S DEATH

SIR HUGH WALPOLE (Reed. June 2, 9 a.m.) LONDON, June 1. The death has occurred of Sir Hugh Walpole, the novelist, following a heart attack. He was 56 years of age. Sir Hugh Walpole ' was born at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1884, his father being a vicar there. In 1887 the family moved to New York, where Dr. Walpble had accepted an appointment as professor in a theological college. Seven years later they migrated to England, where the son later became a famous novelist, and the father Bishop of Edinburgh. After completing his education at King’s School, Canterbury, and Emmanuel College. Cambridge, Sir Hugli Walpole worked for a year or so as teacher at a boys' school in the provinces. Then he went to London, settled in lodgings at Chelsea, and reviewed books for the newspapers, and wrote novels.

He had written bis first novel, “The Wooden Horse,” while he was at Cambridge, but, discouraged by the friend to whose judgment he submitted it. laid it aside for about five years, and only offered it for publication, and bad it accepted, in 1909. It was fairly well received. Other novels followed, and in 1911 he was well established as an author.

In the early days of the Great War he worked with the Red Cross on the Russian front, and later he was put in charge of British propaganda at Petrograd, now Leningrad, and lived there throughout the chaos of the first revolution.

He wrote one or two plays and did the study of Trollope, in the English Men of Letters Series, and latterly adapted several books to the films.