OBITUARY

Southland Times, Issue 25549, 18 December 1944, Page 5

OBITUARY

MR PHILIP GUEDALLA (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, Dec. 16. The death has occurred of Mr Philip Guedalla. Mr Philip Guedalla, author, barrister and politician, was born in Manchester in 1889, and educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in modern history. In 1911 he was president of the Oxford Union. A keen student of literature, he was said to have puzzled examiners occasionally with references to works of which they had never heard. His first books, “Ignes Fatui,” a volume of parody and “Metri Gratia,” verse and prose, were published while he was at the university. Called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1913, Mr Guedalla practised until 1923 when he retired to devote himself to literature. During the last war he was legal adviser to the Contracts Department of the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions and also organized and was secretary to the Flax Control Board. An ardent Liberal, Mr Guedalla did much valuable work for the party’s cause, but between 1922 and 1931 he suffered a succession of defeats in his efforts to enter the House of Commons. In his literary work, however, particularly biography, he was highly successful. His studies of politicians present and past, including Mr Winston Churchill. Palmerston and Gladstone and his life of Wellington were regarded as brilliant commentaries. A master of epigrams, he was a witty speaker. “Biography,” he once said, “is a thing with certain perfectly defined limits. It is a region that is bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary and on the west by tedium.”