Born at Southsea, the son of Surgeon-Captain Fred Claude Bromley Gittings and his wife Dora Mary, née Brayshaw, the young Gittings was educated at St Edward's School, Oxford, where he was taught by George Mallaby, and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he arrived in 1930 with a scholarship, gaining a First in 1933.
[1] With Jo Manton, he wrote Dorothy Wordsworth (1985) and the same year published his last book of verse, People, Places, Personal.
[1] In 1934, Gittings married Katherine Edith Cambell, a Cambridge contemporary who had been at Girton College and was known as Kay, and they had two sons, called Robert and John, together, but this marriage ended in divorce.
In 1949, he married secondly Joan Greville Manton, called Jo, who was a BBC colleague and also a biographer.
[1] A tall man, Gittings had a high forehead and bald head, a warm personality and a fine sense of humour.