David Holbrook


David Kenneth Holbrook was a British writer, poet and academic. From 1989 he was an Emeritus Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge.

Life

David Holbrook was born in Norwich in 1923. He was educated at City of Norwich School and won a scholarship to study English at Downing College, Cambridge for a year in 1941, where he was a pupil of F. R. Leavis. He is sometimes identified as a Leavis disciple, but their relationship was slighter than this might suggest. Holbrook was called up for military service with the British Army in 1942 and served until 1945 as an officer with the East Riding Yeomanry. His novel Flesh Wounds is a lightly fictionalised account of his D-Day campaign experiences with the East Riding Yeomanry.
In 1945 he returned to Downing to complete his degree, which he did in 1947. In 1946 he made a bleak visit to George Orwell on Jura. The actual reason was to see his girlfriend Susan Watson, who was Orwell's housekeeper, but Orwell assumed it was connected with Holbrook's membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and gave him a frosty reception.
After Cambridge, he became an editor with Edgell Rickword, of the communist cultural periodical Our Time. He then took up teaching positions, for the Workers' Educational Association and then at a secondary school in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire. He became a full-time writer in the early 1960s. He also renewed links with the University of Cambridge, becoming a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1961, a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge in 1981 and an Emeritus Fellow of Downing in 1988.
The Associated University Presses marked his seventieth birthday by publishing a Festschrift entitled Powers of Being in October 1995. The book of essays is edited by Edwin Webb, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich, and held contributions by sixteen academics and teachers from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, including a portrait written by Boris Ford. In over thirty years his range of publications was prodigious: from `English for Maturity', his first book on teaching English, to `Creativity and Popular Culture', he wrote about literature, culture, and education, as well as producing his poetry and his novels. His distinguished literary achievements are suitably celebrated.
He was a Fellow of the English Association.

Works

Novels

Holbrook wrote several novels based on his own life and his family history. These were not Romans à clef—most characters were identified by their real names—but they were closely based on real events without the constraints of veracity. The novels were not written in the internal chronological order.
His first novel told the story of the escapades of Paul Grimmer as a tank officer in the Normandy invasions. The events of Grimmer's adolescent life up to his enlistment were recounted in A Play of Passion, which told of his involvement with the Maddermarket Theatre and its founder Nugent Monck.
In Going Off The Rails, Holbrook recreates the Edwardian lives of his paternal grandparents in rural Norfolk. His grandfather William built wagons in the Midland and Great Northern Railway workshops at Melton Constable. Holbrook's father worked as a railway booking clerk in North Walsham. He moved to Norwich when he was suspected of theft.
His other novels are Nothing Larger Than Life ; Worlds Apart ; A Little Athens ; Jennifer ; The Gold in Father's Heart ; Even If They Fail ; and Getting It Wrong With Uncle Tom.

Poetry

Education

English for Maturity is a guide for secondary school English teachers drawing on Holbrook's experience in that role at Bassingbourn.
His other books on education are English for the Rejected ; English in Australia Now ; The Exploring Word ; Children's Writing ; The Secret Places ; Education, Nihilism and Survival ; Education and Philosophical Anthropology ; and English for Meaning.

List of other works