Arthur Calder-Marshall

Born: 19 August 1908 in Wallington, Surrey, England.

Died: 17 April 1992 in Ashford, Kent.

Arthur Calder-Marshall was born in El Misti, Woodcote Road, Wallington, Surrey, the son of Alice (Poole) and Arthur Grotjan Marshall (later Calder-Marshall; 1875 –1958), a civil engineer. The elder Arthur was grandson of the sculptor William Calder Marshall (1813–1894). William Calder Marshall's father William Marshall (1780–1859), D.L. (Edinburgh), a goldsmith (including to the King in the early nineteenth century) and jeweler, had married Annie, daughter of merchant William Calder, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1810-11, by his wife Agnes, a daughter of landed gentleman Hugh Dalrymple. The Marshall family were Episcopalian goldsmiths from Perthshire; the Calder family were merchants.

Arthur Calder-Marshall was an English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist and biographer. He graduated from Hertford College, Oxford in 1930 were he met the legendary Aleister Crowley whom Calder-Marshall recounts in his memoirs The Magic of My Youth.

A short, unhappy stint teaching English at Denstone College, Staffordshire, 1931–33, inspired his novel Dead Centre. In the 1930s, Calder-Marshall adopted strong left-wing views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and was also a member of the London-based left-wing Writers and Readers Group which also included Randall Swingler, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mulk Raj Anand, Maurice Richardson and Rose Macaulay.

After WWII, he wrote documentary films. One of these, The World Is Rich, garnered an Oscar nomination for best feature documentary, and won a special BAFTA award. Calder-Marshall's fiction and non-fiction covered a wide range of subjects. He himself remarked, "I have never written two books on the same subject or with the same object."

In the 1960s, he took on commissioned work which included novelizations of movies such as the Dirk Bogarde film Victim and a children's novel about British spy James Bond's nephew, The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½. Calder-Marshall also prepared the definite Bodley Head edition of Jack London's works, Lone Wolf, during this same time.