Henry Wilfrid Carr

Henry Wilfrid Carr (22 February 1894 – 3 April 1962) was a British consular official in Zurich where, in 1918, he encountered James Joyce.

The gravity of his wounds caused the Germans to send him for treatment at a monastery where the monks nursed him to a partial recovery.

[1] He joined a newly-established amateur dramatic group, "The English Players", run by James Joyce and Claud Sykes.

The group's first production was The Importance of Being Earnest with the opera singer Tristan Rawson as John Worthing and Carr as Algernon Moncrieff.

In 1962, while on a visit to London, he had a heart attack, and died in St Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington on 3 April, aged 68.

Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann puts it thus: Carr and Compton are described as having "swaggersticks tight in their oxters, as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart".

[9] In the 1970s, Tom Stoppard, struck by the fact that Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara were all in Zurich in 1917, wrote a play that brought all three together in the unreliable memory of the octogenarian Carr looking back five decades later.

The young Carr spies on Lenin, argues with Tzara about the nature of true art, is persuaded by Joyce to play Algernon and later quarrels over the cost of buying new trousers for the role.

[10]After further confused memories and mix-ups in the second act, the old Carr concludes the play: Great days ... Zurich during the war.