Arthur Calder-Marshall

Arthur Calder-Marshall was an English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist, and biographer. 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 jeweller, 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. 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. In 1937, Calder-Marshall wrote scripts for MGM although none appears to have been filmed. 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, Calder-Marshall took on commissioned work which included a novelisation of the Dirk Bogarde film Victim. He has additionally been proposed as the author of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½ a children's novel about British spy James Bond's nephew, published under the pseudonym R. D. Mascott. With his wife, documentary screenplay-writer Ara (born Violet Nancy Sales), he was the father of the actress Anna Calder-Marshall and the grandfather of the actor Tom Burke.