Gerald Hanley

Gerald Hanley (17 February 1916 – 7 September 1992) was a British novelist and travel writer of Irish descent.

Hanley, born on 17 February 1916 in Liverpool (not County Cork, Ireland, as he claimed), was the youngest of a large, Irish-Liverpudleian Catholic family. Both his working class parents were from Ireland, his father Edward from Dublin, his mother Bridget from Cobh, County Cork, but were married in Liverpool in 1891. His father Edward was a seaman, especially on Cunard liners, but he also some times worked on shore.

In 1934 Gerald went to East Africa, where he worked on a farm in Kenya until the war in 1939. This was arranged with the help of James Hanley's friend John Cowper Powys, whose brother William farmed in Kenya.

Joining the King's African Rifles of the British army on the outbreak of the Second World War, Hanley served in Somalia and in Burma, where Monsoon Victory (1946) is set. Prior to this he had had a few short stories published. While he published a number of novels he also wrote radio plays for the BBC as well as some film scripts, most notably The Blue Max (1966). He was also one of several script writers for a life of Gandhi (1964). Parts of his script were used for the Richard Attenborough film Gandhi (see Attenborough's book on the subject).

In 1950, Hanley went to the Punjab in India, and he also lived in Srinagar, Pakistan, where he was married to Asha Weymiss, a Brahmin woman who had been adopted as a child by an English woman working in India. He settled in County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1954 with his first wife, Diana Fittall (some sources give a later date). He is survived by 7 children with Diana and two with Asha.

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