School No.5724. At Dulwich College 1900-1905
American writer of thrillers and detective stories, Chandler was born in Chicago but brought up from the age of seven in England. At Dulwich he won form and subject prizes on both Modern and Classical sides before studying languages in France and Germany. After a short period in the British Civil Service he returned to America in 1912 and setted in California, working as as an accountant, auditor and later vice-president of an oil company.
During the Depression Chandler began to write short stories and novelettes for the detective pulp magazines before turning to 'private eye' novels such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), featuring the honest but cynical detective antihero, Philip Marlowe.
Auden spoke for many when he wrote that Chandler's thrillers were 'serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art'.
At Dulwich College 1954-61
Andrew Crozier won an open exhibition to Christ's College Cambridge in a year when the College sent 16 boys to Cambridge and 13 to Oxford. A major figure in the Cambridge movement of poetry, he founded Ferry Press and edited The English Intelligencer in 1966 before moving to Essex University where he founded The Wivenhoe Park Review; this in turn became The Park when he moved to teach at Keele University.
All these publications included work by leading American poets such as Charles Olson and Edward Dorn. Indeed, with his guest editorship of Granta in March 1964 he was one of the first in England to recognise the powerful nature of what was happening in the States and was equally prepared to rattle the shaky status of the safe English Movement poets.
His publications included: Loved Litter of Time Spent (SUNY 1967) with a Preface by J.H. Prynne; Train Rides (R Books 1968); Walking on Grass (Ferry Press 1969); The Veil Poem (Burning Deck 1974); Printed Circuit (Street Editions 1974); Pleats (Great Works Editions 1975); High Zero (Street Editions 1978); Were There (Many Press 1978); Collected Poems published by Allardyce Barnett under the title All Where Each Is. Pleats was a recipient of the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award.
In 1987 he edited the poetry anthology A Various Art (Carcanet) which, according to volume 12 of The Oxford English Literary History, ‘scorned the pusillanimous set of conventions consolidated by the Movement in the 1950s’.
One of Crozier’s most important roles was in the discovery of the American Objectivist Carl Rakosi who had not published any poetry since his New Directions volume of Selected Poems in 1941. Crozier had discovered this slim volume and recognised the talent in the work prompting him to set out to discover what he could about the poet.
In 1995 Crozier edited Rakosi’s Poems 1923-41 (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles) and in 1996 edited and introduced John Rodker’s Poems & Adolphe 1920 (Carcanet Press).Peter Ackroyd observed about Crozier’s work ‘…within the unforced texture of the work there is created that illusion, indispensable to the best poetry, of the familiar being made new again…’ The Spectator.
School No.8674. At Dulwich College 1915-1916
Born in Cairo, where his father was stationed as a government official, Forester studied medicine at Guy's Hospital but left without a degree to pursue a career in writing. His first success was Payment Deferred, a novel written at the age of twenty-four and later dramatised and filmed with Charles Laughton in the leading role.
He is best known for his creation of the character Horatio Hornblower and the Hornblower novel A Ship of the Line won the James Tait Memorial Prize for Literature in 1938. The African Queen (1935) was made into a highly successful film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the prim missionary Rose Sayer.
At Dulwich 1934-38
The poet Hamish Henderson was one of the most brilliant and original Dulwich writers since Raymond Chandler; he contributed many editorials, essays and poems to The Alleynian from April 1938, almost single-handedly for several issues bringing the magazine to one of its high points. Henderson saw at first hand the evil of Hitler's regime during a school trip to Germany in 1937. A student of Modern Languages at Cambridge, he was attacked by Conservative rioters at Cambridge for his communism. He next worked as a courier for a Quaker organisation helping Jews to escape from Germany, leaving at the outbreak of war, whereupon he served in the Intelligence Corps alongside the famous 51st Highland Division in North Africa and in Italy; in the latter campaign he worked closely with the Italian Communist partisans (who quoted Dante to him). This led to his life-long commitment to socialism and to a translation of some of the prison letters of the revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937); it was while working on these that he was asked to leave Italy, following the capitulation. Henderson played a part in the history of the War: it was at his order that the Fascist War Minister, Rodolfo Graziani, made his broadcast appeal to the Axis troops in Italy to lay down their arms. His Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948) is a very moving sequence of poems, meditating on the war in the Libyan desert, on death, and on individual soldiers, particularly the Scots and the Germans – ‘the sacrificed of history’s great rains’.
After the war he returned to his native Scotland where he made a notable contribution, as a member of Edinburgh University's School of Scottish Studies, to the folk song and story revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In Alias MacAlias – Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature, 1992, Hamish Henderson brought together essays he had written over 50 years on the various revivals of the folk tradition in Scotland as each new generation rediscovers and recreates the folk culture of the past. They include a description of the People’s Festival Ceilidhs of 1951, 1952 and 1953, which were in many ways the predecessors of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Hamish Henderson was a poet and teacher who turned to film making when his university career was drawing to a close. With Timothy Neat, who published the first volume of Henderson’s biography in 2007 - The Making of a Poet (1919-1953), he made The Tree of Liberty: the songs of Robert Burns, which won the prize for the best documentary at the Celtic International Festival of Film and Television in 1987. After that came Play me something, a feature film about storytelling, in which Henderson starred along side John Berger and Tilda Swinton. It won the Europa prize for best film at the Barcelona Film Festival in 1989. In 1999, Freedom Come-All-Ye An 80th Birthday Souvenir for Hamish Henderson was published, apart from a selection of poems and songs it included an essay Henderson wrote in 1968 on The idea of the poem, and a poem to another poet – Hugh MacDiarmid written in 1945.
School No.1951. At Dulwich College 1878-84 Secretary of the Debating Society 1882-3. Rugby 3rd XV 1882-3. Shooting VIII 1882. December 1881 played Leonardo in the College production of The Merchant of Venice.
Went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1884 where he was Secretary of the Union in 1885 and received hi BA in 1888. After going down from Oxford, he went on stage with F.R. Benson's Shakespeare Company and Compton's Comedy Company before commencing his first novels. In 1895 the first of these, A Romance of Wastdale, was published. Mason's most famous novel, The Four Feathers, was published in 1907 the year after he had been elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry. In 1910 he introduced the character of Hanaud, a French detective, in the novel At the Villa Rose. He would become a leader among fictional detectives in further works such as The Witness for the Defence and established Mason's reputation as a crime novelist.
During World War I, he served in the Manchester Regiment as a captain, being promoted Major in 1917. Later in that year he served with the Royal Marine Light Infantry. After the war his writing career continued to flourish with works like The House of the Arrow in 1924, No Other Tiger, 1927 and The Prisoner in the Opal, 1929. Fire over England (1937) was a very early film starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. In 1939 The Four Feathers was made into a film by Alexander Korda and gained the award at the Venice Film Festival for the best British feature film. The novel has been filmed twice more, most recently in 2001. The 1960 film Sink the Bismarck was also based on one of his novels.
In 1943 Mason was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, and in 1946 became President of the Alleyn Club. He was an FRGS, President of the Swiss Alpine Club (London branch) and a member of the Alpine Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron.
School No. 16674. At Dulwich College 1954-1962
Poet, novelist and editor, Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka. He moved to Canada in 1962 to study at Bishop's University in Quebec, the University of Toronto and Queen's University, Kingston Ontario, then became a university lecturer.
His early poetry collections included The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There's a trick with a knife I'm learning to do (1979), which both won a Governor-General's award. His novel The English Patient, which tells the story of a Canadian nurse tending a badly burned soldier during the Second World War, won the 1992 Booker Prize. The subsequent film won no less than nine Oscars in 1996.
School No. 17805. At Dulwich College 1960-1966
Graham Swift became a full time author in 1983 when his novel Waterland won the Winifred Holtby Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was nominated for the Booker. Ever After (1992) won the 1994 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and Last Orders (1996) won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize. Last Orders was described by The Guardian as “Inspired… his finest novel yet”. Last Orders was made into a film in 2001, written and directed by Fred Schepisi, starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. His most recent novel, published in 2003, is The Light of Day.
His work has been translated into more than 20 languages.
He has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of York and East Anglia.
School No. 4493. At Dulwich College 1894-1900 "six years of unbroken bliss"
P G Wodehouse was, perhaps, the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. At Dulwich he excelled in Classics, sang, acted and was editor of the school magazine, The Alleynian, from 1899 to 1900. He played for both the 1st XV and 1st XI; in his last term he had published an essay called 'Some Aspects of Game Captaincy" in the Public School Magazine, for which he received a fee of half a guinea.
He became a reporter on The Globe newspaper in 1902 and began to contribute school stories to The Captain, a magazine for boys. Dulwich College figures, thinly disguised, in the school novels Mike, The Gold Bat, The White Feather, etc. Up until the Second World War Wodehouse attended cricket and rugby matches at the College and wrote accounts of many for The Alleynian. In his later years on Long Island he regularly followed newspaper reports of games at Dulwich from the airmail edition of The Times.
Wodehouse is most famous for his creation of the character 'Jeeves' in 1919, and he continued to write these stories for fifty-two years. However he also produced a great many other literary works and by the time of his death had written 10 books for boys, 43 novels, 300 short stories and was author or part-author of 16 plays and 23 musical comedies. In 1937 he was awarded the 14th annual gold medal of the International Mark Twain Society. In 1974 he was made KBE.
There is a permanent display in the College Library, which bears his name, of his desk and memorabilia donated by his widow. The College possesses a collection of his books, letters and also manuscripts, the latter at his bequest.