British Author
Born 1916 Died 1974
Richard James Arthur Pope-Hennessy was born in London on
the 20th November 1916, the younger son of Ladislaus Herbert
Richard Pope-Hennessy and his wife, Una Constance who was the
daughter of Arthur Birch, Lieutenant-Governor of Ceylon.
James as he was generally came from a close knit Catholic
family and was educated at Downside School and at Balliol
College, Oxford but generally showed a lack of interest in
education thanks to a natural rebellious streak which may have
had something to do with his homosexuality.
Due largely to his mother's influence, he formed the
ambition of becoming a writer and left Oxford in 1937 without
completing his degree, and went to work for the Catholic
publishers Sheed and Ward, as an editorial assistant. Whilst
working at the company's offices in Paternoster Row in London
he worked on his first book, London Fabric (1939),
for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. He left the
publishers in 1938 when his mother found him a job as private
secretary to Hubert Young, the Governor of Trinidad.
Although his time abroad provided the material for his later
West Indian Summer (1943), he disliked the work.
The outbreak of World War II gave him the excuse to return
to Britain, where he enlisted as a private in an aircraft
battery. He was later transferred to military intelligence,
given a commission and spent the latter part of the war as a
member of the British army staff at Washington.
After the end of the war James wrote on account of his
experiences in America and set out to become a full time
writer. He had a brief spell as the literary editor of
The Spectator between 1947 and 1949 before he
decided to travel to France and write Aspects of
Provence which was published in 1952. He eventually
established himself as one of the leading biographers of his
time; his first effort in this direction being a two volume
biography of Monckton Milnes which appeared in 1949 under
the titles The Years of Promise and The
Flight of Youth . This was followed by further
biographies of the Earl of Crewe and of Queen Mary, for
which he was rewarded by being created a Commander of the
Royal Victorian Order in 1960. He then wrote a life of his
grandfather, the colonial governor John Pope Hennessy under
the title Verandah, followed by an account of the Atlantic
slave traffickers, Sins of the Fathers (1967).
In 1970 he took out Irish citizenship and went to live at
Banagher in County Offaly and produced respectable
biographies of both Anthony Trollope and Robert Louis
Stevenson in the early 1970s before being given a large
advance to begin work on his next subject Noël Coward. But
despite being a succesful professional biographer James was
careless with money and suffered a regular series of financial
crises and often relied on the goodwill of friends to get by.
He became an alcoholic and a frequenter of back-street bars
and shady pubs where he mixed with the wrong crowd. He was
eventually beaten up by a gang of youths and later died of his
injuries at the St Charles Hospital in Kensington on the
25th January 1974, and was later buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.
Bibliography
- London Fabric, (1939)
- West Indian Summer, (1943)
- America is an Atmosphere, (1947)
- Aspects of Provence, (1952)
- The Years of Promise, (1949)
- The Flight of Youth, (1949)
- The Houses of Parliament, (1953)
- Lord Crewe, the Likeness of a Liberal,
(1955)
.
- Queen Mary, (1959)
- Verandah, (1964)
- Sins of the Fathers, (1967)
- nthony Trollope, (1971)
- Robert Louis Stevenson, (1974)
REFERENCES
James Lees-Milne, ‘Hennessy, (Richard) James Arthur Pope-
(1916–1974)’, rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004
James Pope-Hennessy
http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/5765-0/Author-James-Pope-Hennessy.htm
Notable personalities at Kensal Green Cemetery
www.kensalgreen.co.uk/documents/KG_notables.html - 48k