Charles Patrick Graves
Charles Patrick Ranke Graves (1 December 1899 – 20 February 1971) was a British journalist, travel writer and novelist.
His father was Alfred Perceval Graves (born in Dublin, 22 July 1846) who worked in the Home Office before becoming a senior inspector of schools.
His second wife, and the mother of five of his children, including Charles, was Amalie (Amy) Elizabeth Sophie (or Sophia) von Ranke, the daughter of a professor of medicine at the University of Munich.
[2] His part-German heritage caused problems at school and harassment from fellow students during World War I.
He would often travel, at the expense of his newspaper, to Dinard, La Baule-Escoublac, Biarritz, Cannes, Deauville, Le Touquet, Venice and other resorts of the rich and famous in the 1920s and 1930s and write of who and what he saw and heard there.
His literary friends included George Bernard Shaw, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling.
Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Owen Nares, and Fred and Adele Astaire were some of his friends in show business.
Other associates were cartoonist Tom Webster, dancer Irene Castle and writer Michael Arlen.
Among his scoops in journalism was to break the news that Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had become engaged to the Duke of York, the future King George VI.
One of his side projects was to ghost-write a memoir by Richard Speaight, society and court photographer, that was serialised in the Daily Express in 1926.
His working method was to compile extensive notes by hand and then dictate to a secretary who would take it down in shorthand and then type up the first draft.
Every summer after they married he and his wife would travel to the continent and hire a car and driver and tour popular resorts where they would stay at the best hotels.
[12] The newly-weds moved into a large Regency style terrace house at 70 (later 102) Gloucester Place, London, where they employed four servants.
On Sunday evening, 8 December 1940, as they were preparing for bed, an incendiary bomb struck their house and set fire to the roof.
In February 1945 he and his wife accompanied a group of war correspondents across the channel and toured Belgium and the Netherlands shortly after the German occupation had ended.
[17] He was living on Barbados, in Villa Fustic, an 11-acre estate with a large 18th-century house owned and redesigned by his wife using the services of Oliver Messel in the 1960s,[18] when he died on 20 February 1971.
It was attended by his widow, relatives, friends as well as representatives of the Associated Newspapers Group, the National Advertising Corporation, The Press Club and the British Guild of Travel Writers.
David Holloway, As a writer Charles Graves was always under the shadow of his elder brother Robert, though, for most of his life, of the two he probably earned more by his pen.
