Mervyn Peake

Born on July 9, 1911, in Kuling, a hill station on Mount Lu in central China, three months before the revolution that ended the Qing dynasty, Mervyn Peake was the son of Ernest Cromwell Peake, a medical missionary with the London Missionary Society, and Amanda Elizabeth Powell, who had come out to China as a missionary assistant. He attended Tientsin Grammar School until the family sailed for England in December 1922, then Eltham College, where the English master Eric Drake encouraged his drawing and his verse. He trained at Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, had a painting accepted by the Royal Academy in 1931, and in 1932 followed Drake to an artists' colony on the Channel Island of Sark. Back in London he taught life drawing at the Westminster School of Art, where he met the painter Maeve Gilmore; they married in 1937 and had three children. His first book, the pirate picture story Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, appeared in 1939. Turned down as a war artist, he was conscripted into the Royal Artillery and then the Royal Engineers, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1942, and was invalided out the following year, after which the War Artists' Advisory Committee sent him to draw the glassblowers at Chance Brothers in Smethwick. He had begun Titus Groan in the army in 1940, and it was published in 1946, opening the story of the vast, crumbling castle of Gormenghast and its seventy-seventh Earl. Gormenghast followed in 1950 and shared a Royal Society of Literature prize with his poems The Glassblowers. He illustrated The Hunting of the Snark, the Alice books and Treasure Island. The failure of his play The Wit to Woo in the West End in 1957 brought another breakdown, and Titus Alone (1959) was written as illness closed in on him. He died on November 17, 1968, aged fifty-seven, at a care home near Oxford run by his brother-in-law.

In 1945 Picture Post sent Peake to Germany with the journalist Tom Pocock, and he was among the first British civilians to see Belsen, where prisoners too sick to be moved were still dying. He drew a young woman in her last hour, then wrote a poem about her and his own unease at having looked at her as an artist.