GMW Wemyss

GMW (Gervase MW) Wemyss is the (wisely) pseudonymous author of the Village Tales series of novels. (He has no desire to be kicked out of his clubs, after all....)

 He is also, in more serious guise, an historian, critic, and rural essayist, the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940,  a history of the resignation of Neville Chamberlain and the formation of Churchill’s wartime government,   and of  Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside, a collection of rural, West Country essays.

 With the American historian Markham Shaw Pyle, he is the co-author of  ’37: The year of portent  ;   When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS   Titanic; and the forthcoming   The Crisis: 1914   ; and co-editor and -annotator of   The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated   ;  The Annotated  Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults);  and a forthcoming annotated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.

 Despite his chosen nom de famille de plume  ( de ma tante ), and his possessing no small tincture of Scots, Anglo-Welsh, Anglo-Irish, and Midlands ancestry, his is largely a West Country family stretching from Darkest Devon to the cathedral close of Salisbury and on to Ludgershall and the Collingbournes. His paternal grandfather was Somerset-born, though he removed to the countryside near Westbury upon his marriage; his grandfather on his mother’s side was from Malvern. The settings of his works tend to reflect these influences, and those of other ancestral holdings and birthplaces from Aviemore to Omagh to Nether Wallop in Hants.

Personal life
 Mr Wemyss was born on 13 July 1962, near   Houston, Renfrewshire. He was a dry-bob at school. When he went up to University (the  dark   blue one), he read a Joint Schools degree, the revelation of which he eschews as being too identifying but which he vociferously denies was PPE, and took A Very Good Degree (ahem).

Having an appallingly ramified extended family, he has spent a goodish amount of time in numerous and widely separated places, including Mid Yell, Dallas, Turriff, Montrose, Elgin, Crosby Ravensworth, Crosby-on-Eden, Repton, Romsley, Earls Barton, Staunton, Petty France (Gloucs), Pylle, Westbury, Wilcot, Little Cheverell, Pennington, Mount Pleasant, and rather a nice urban bolthole not a million miles from Long Acre. In that last context, it is worth noting that his mother was a classically trained contralto. He himself studied violin and composition, and sang  basso   at university and in various parish choirs. Fortunately, for all his æsthetic interests, he was never debagged and tossed into Mercury Pond, owing to the protective colouration of tweeds and an interest in field sports.

That he was born near Houston was rather an accident, as typically, he arrived unexpectedly early, possibly so as to be born on a Friday the Thirteenth.

 After happily undistinguished and undangerous service in the Forces during the deceptive interlude of peace in the 1980s, Mr Wemyss immersed himself in his own studies in what time he could spare from the management of various family affairs, both for his paternal grandfather and the main estate, and for his father and   his   estate. (His mother’s family, which tended to run to clergymen such as his reverend grandfather, to dons, to medicos, and to officers of the Andrew and the Bootnecks, did not, consequently, require much in the way of estate management, although an uncle kept a decentish farm in such countryside as is left within fifty miles of Birmingham, in which city Mr Wemyss’ grandfather’s last, and best paid, living was.)

Mr Wemyss also made occasional forays into the hard, local graft of politics (he is a proud Dry and a devoté of the Blessèd Margaret of Grantham).

And, of course, he wrote, although not as GMW Wemyss.

It was during this period that, travelling abroad, he first made the acquaintance of Mr Pyle, with whom, decades after, in the early 2010s, he formed the publishing imprint, Bapton Books.

His interests include cricket; hunting, shooting, and angling; beagling; squash; polo (No. 4); real ale, real cider, real perry, and wine; rural pursuits; steam railways; draught horses; Bristol motorcars; Classics; history, geography, agriculture, archæology, sociology, anthropology, politics, philosophy, and classical liberal economics; parish matters; campanology; heraldry; fit and likely lads; and music, largely the Baroque and the corpus of English classical music, with an emphasis upon choral works.

Mr Wemyss is a member of various local and regional historical societies; various learned societies in the disciplines of politics, economics, and history; various hunts; the RSPB; the Royal Agricultural Society of England; the Rare Breeds Survival Trust; CAMRA; the British Beekeeper’s Association; the Countryside Alliance; the British Deer Society; the British Horse Society; the Suffolk Horse Society; the Shire Horse Society; the Gloucestershire Old Spots Pig Breeders’ Club; the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; the British Association for Shooting and Conservation; the Conservative Party; the Henry Jackson Society; the Prayer Book Society; his Regimental Association; the Campaign for Christ Church (Oxon); &c.

He is precisely as great an anorak as these facts suggest.

The Village Tales series
Cross and Poppy  (2013)

Evensong  (2015)

The Day Thou Gavest  (2016)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">Ye Little Hills Like Lambs (2016)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">Ordinary Time (forthcoming 2017)

History
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Confidence of the House: May 1940  (2011)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">with Markham Shaw Pyle:

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic (2012)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">’37: The year of portent  (2012)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Crisis: 1914  (forthcoming, 2018)

Literary criticism
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">with Markham Shaw Pyle:

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated (2011)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults) (2012)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">Kidnapped (forthcoming)

Essays
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.49in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside (2012)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">with Markham Shaw Pyle:

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays and Meditations (2011, 2012)

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy (2012)

Contemporary affairs
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">with Markham Shaw Pyle:

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-left:0.98in;margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;">Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 – 2014 (Bapton Books Position Papers & Criticism) (2014)