Robert Gittings

Gittings, Robert William Victor (1911–1992), poet and writer, was born on 1 February 1911 at Southsea, the son of Surgeon-Captain Fred Claude Bromley Gittings and Dora Mary, née Brayshaw. He attended St Edward's School, Oxford, where he was influenced by an outstanding teacher, George Mallaby. While at school he had poems published, bringing him into contact with Christopher Fry, who became a lifelong friend. In 1930 he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a history scholar, and gained a first in 1933. During his undergraduate years his literary interests developed and he received encouragement from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose college rooms were adjacent to his. In 1931 he was awarded the chancellor's gold medal for English verse. In 1933 he was made a research fellow of the college and in 1934 he married Katherine (Kay) Edith Cambell, a former student at Girton College. They had two sons. Gittings was history supervisor from 1938 until 1940, when he moved to the BBC as writer and producer. During his twenty-three years with the BBC his output was prolific and of consistently high quality. His schools broadcasts—dramatized history and literary programmes—are classics of their kind. He was a regular contributor to long-running and highly regarded programmes including Poets and Poetry, World History Series, Poetry Now, and The World of Books. His marriage ended in divorce and in 1949 he married again; his second wife was Joan (Jo) Greville Manton, a colleague at the BBC, and herself a distinguished biographer and later collaborator with Gittings. They had one daughter.

Gittings would probably wish to be remembered as a poet. His first major book of verse, Wentworth Place (1950), was well received and held to be rich in promise and achievement with 'lines that hold fast in the memory' (TLS, 31 March 1950). Here and in Famous Meeting (1953) he showed a rare ability to bring alive the past. He published twelve volumes of poetry, disciplined and graceful in the Georgian tradition, but later volumes did not develop the earlier promise. Gittings was a good, minor poet of real talent and sound craftsmanship, a keen observer of the natural scene and the human condition capable of finely tuned and evocative verse, but not rising to the highest levels of perception and imagination.

In 1954, Gittings's John Keats: the Living Year was published and received with acclaim. In this book of freshness, originality, and excitement Gittings displayed the skills he was to refine in his later biographies—meticulous scholarship combined with a keen literary sensitivity, an appreciation of social and historical context, and an infectious sense of the joys of detection. The Mask of Keats followed in 1956, and an excursion into Shakespeare studies in 1960 (Shakespeare's Rival).

Gittings left the BBC in 1964 and in the years that followed he established his reputation as a major authority on both Keats and Hardy. John Keats (awarded the W. H. Smith literary award) was published in 1969. Gittings's studies of Hardy, though conscientious, scholarly, and eminently readable, are perhaps marred by a certain lack of respect for Hardy the man. In this Gittings did not wholeheartedly apply his own dictum that 'biography begins, in one sense or another, with praise' (The Nature of Biography, 1978, 19). But as a literary biographer Gittings is masterly and he well illustrates his own definition of biography as 'poetry with a conscience' (ibid., 10), in his combination of clear observation, enthusiasm, search for truth, and felicity with words. The Young Thomas Hardy appeared in 1975, followed by The Older Hardy in 1978 and The Second Mrs Hardy (with Jo Manton) in 1979.

As playwright, Gittings was a master of radio drama. Less well known were the plays he wrote over several years for women's institutes. Son et lumière (This Tower my Prison, 1961, and Conflict at Canterbury for the 1970 Canterbury Festival) were much acclaimed while Introducing Thomas Hardy, his brilliant double act with Frances Horowitz, first performed in 1971, was in demand throughout the country until Horowitz's death in 1978.

In 1985 Gittings turned to the Wordsworths and with Jo Manton wrote Dorothy Wordsworth, an engaging and revealing study. He also published his last collection of poems, People, Places, Personal, a title which fairly describes the wide range of his poetry. In the short poems 'The Bell Tolls' and 'In the Car Park', he digs below the surface of the mundane to expose human fragility and insecurity.

Gittings was always an enthusiast for games—squash, golf, and real tennis—and was a dependable middle-order batsman until well into his seventies. He regularly recruited actors from the Chichester Theatre to play in cricket matches. Tall and trim, he had the high, bald dome of an intellectual, with a warm, friendly, and expressive face, always enquiring and slightly quizzical. He had an attractive personality. A man of strong principles, he was, nevertheless, unfailingly considerate and generous, with a gift for friendship and a warm sense of humour.

Appointed CBE in 1970, Gittings was awarded the honorary LittD by Cambridge in 1970 and by Leeds in 1981. His election as honorary fellow of Jesus College in 1979 gave him particular pleasure.

Robert Gittings died at Chichester on 18 February 1992. On the morning before he died, he read the first copy of his last book, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, fresh from the publishers. He commented: 'It's all right. It'll do, I think' (Jesus College (Cambridge) Report, 47). The cremation took place on 24 February at Chichester crematorium.