Raleigh Trevelyan

Walter Raleigh Trevelyan (6 July 1923 – 23 October 2014) was a British author, editor, and publisher and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He resided at both Shepherd Market in Mayfair, London, and in Cornwall. His Spanish partner Raúl Balín died in 2004. Childhood Raleigh Trevelyan was born in the Andaman Islands. India, to Colonel Walter Raleigh Fetherstonhaugh Trevelyan, commander of the British Indian Army garrison at the penal settlement of Port Blair, and Olive Beatrice Frost Trevelyan. The family moved to Punjab, and then when he was six, the family trekked on horseback for three weeks to his father's new assignment in Gilgit, where Colonel Trevelyan was posted as military adviser to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. At the age of eight, like many children of the British Raj, Raleigh was packed off to a boarding prep school in England and rarely saw his parents after that. Professional life and works After leaving Winchester College in 1942, Trevelyan served in the Second World War in the Rifle Brigade and was sent first to Algiers and then to Italy. On 23 May 1944, during the breakout from Anzio, the Green Howards battalion to which he was attached lost 230 men, some of whose deaths he blamed on himself. Towards the end of 1944, back with the Rifle Brigade, Trevelyan got a job in the British military mission in Rome, where he remained for two years, falling in love with central Italy. His participation in the bloody Battle of Anzio, in which he was wounded twice, was the subject of two memoirs. The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After (1957), was recognized for his painfully honest account of how a soldier responds to the terror of being under fire. Later, with the help of German and Italian friends, Trevelyan wrote Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981), which provided a vivid account of what it had been like for soldiers and civilians on the other side of the conflict. After the war Trevelyan worked briefly in merchant banking, then became an editor at William Collins, Sons and later at Jonathan Cape and Michael Joseph, editing both fiction and nonfiction while writing his own books. Some of Trevelyan's early popular books were about Italy. Princes Under the Volcano: Two Hundred Years of a British Dynasty in Sicily (1973), an account of the British role on that island, particularly the Whitaker family, who started out exporting Marsala wine and ended up entertaining European royalty.