A British soldier, sporting gun, and lord of the manor of Five Mile Wallop, Cambridgeshire, in his St James's home, the Qu'hais' Club, he was known as the Old Grouse-Cock,[1] and he is most notable for his adventures after he wakes up in the morning on the day before the Twelfth of August and finds he has turned into a grouse.
[2] Hysteron-Proteron's creator J. K. Stanford wrote in 1964 that "George... owed his origin to a face in the East India Club... On one occasion at breakfast he sent for the waiter and said, in my hearing, 'Didn't I order mutton cutlets with blood?
The original book, The Twelfth, was written between 1942 and 1943 in the North African desert, while the author was serving with the British Eighth Army between El Alamein and Gabès.
[4][6] As he grew older, she insisted that he would never see heaven, and in due course he was educated at Eton,[7] the Royal Military College, Sandhurst,[8] "and the Badminton Library".
[9] His half-brother William Proteron was a Master of Foxhounds, but the two men did not speak to each other for thirty years,[1] this being in connection with their rivalry to inherit the fortune of "a very rich but invalid Hysteron aunt in Suffolk", who when she died left her money equally between the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Society for the Abolition of Bloodsports.
[9] Until his final four years, Hysteron-Proteron's attendance at church was spasmodic, Sunday being his morning for going round his nests and rearing-field with the estate's head keeper, after his Friday and Saturday sport.
However, after giving up shooting in 1938, he would often put on a dark blue suit, stiff white collar, spats, and bowler hat and attend church parade in the family pew.
[14] Hysteron-Proteron found the Church of England's hymns ominous, and once asked the Vicar to lend him some books on the After-life, explaining "When I was a boy, it was just plain heaven and hell, and me nurse always insisted I should never see the first.