James Maurice Scott

James Maurice Scott (13 December 1906 - 12 March 1986) was a British explorer and writer. He is best known for his biography of Gino Watkins, and for the novel Sea-Wyf and Biscuit (1955) which was filmed as Sea Wife in 1957 starring Richard Burton and Joan Collins.

He was born on 13 December 1906 in Egypt where his father was a Judge of the Mixed Court, and was educated at Fettes College and Clare College, Cambridge, where he gained a Blue for Rugby football. He accompanied Gino Watkins on two expeditions, and wrote a biography after Watkins's death in 1932. He was a member of the 1933 British Mount Everest expedition but was not one of the sixteen chosen for the main attempt. In 1939 he joined the 5th Scots Guards Ski Battalion, and ended the war as Commander of the Mountain Warfare School in the Apennines. He was awarded the OBE in 1945. After the war he joined the British Council and worked in Milan and Belgrade until 1948. He was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph from 1948 to 1953. He was married twice, in 1933 to Pamela Watkins, marriage dissolved in 1958, and then to Adriana Rinaldi. He died on 12 March 1986 in Huntingdon.

Between 7 March and 21 May 1951 a series of enigmatic small ads appeared in the Daily Telegraph personal columns, in which 'Biscuit' appeared to be seeking a reunion with 'Sea-Wyf' but was being discouraged by 'Bulldog'. There was a good deal of public speculation, and the Daily Mirror reprinted the whole set of announcements on 26 May.
Four years later Scott published Sea-Wyf and Biscuit, which purported to be the full story behind the advertisements, describing the fourteen-week ordeal of four survivors of a torpedoed freighter in the Indian Ocean. It is hard to be sure whether this is, as Scott maintained, a true story which he learned at first hand fictionalised just enough for the main actors to be unidentifiable, or a plausible made-up story to explain the documented small ads, or whether Scott had created the whole story, inserting the ads himself in order to supply a hook for the novel. Against the third account is the four year delay. If Scott had invented the story, why wait four years to publish?

Scott's substantial output was evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction, with the fiction shared between books for adults including I Keep My Word, A Choice of Heaven and for children such as Cap Across the River and A Journey of Many Sleeps. The non-fiction includes biographies of Gino Watkins, Henry Hudson, Boadicea and George Sand, together with travel books such as A Walk Along the Apennines, and history such as The Tea Story and The White Poppy. Altogether his output amounted to over forty titles.

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