Perceval Landon

Perceval Landon (1869-1927) was an English writer, traveller and journalist, now best remembered for his classic and much reprinted ghost story "Thurnley Abbey".

Perceval Landon was born in Hastings on 29 March 1869. He was the son of the Rev. Edward Henry Landon and his wife, Caroline. His first name was the surname of his mother, daughter of the Rev. and Hon. Arthur Philip Perceval, through whom he was collaterally related to Spencer Perceval. His own family of Landon was of French Huguenot descent, having migrated to London in the 1680s at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

He was educated at Forest School and Hertford College, Oxford. He matriculated in October 1888, obtained Third Class Honours in Classical Moderations in 1890, and graduated with Third Class Honours in Law in 1892. While at Oxford, he was one of the original subscribers to John Woodward and George Burnett's Treatise on Heraldry British and Foreign (1892), and he had a lifelong interest in heraldry. He was Secretary of the Oxford Union in 1891.

He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple but in 1899–1900 he was War Correspondent of The Times during the South African War. He was also involved, with his close and lifelong friend Rudyard Kipling and others, in a daily paper called The Friend started by Lord Roberts in Bloemfontein during the Boer War. This South African experience launched a career of world travel, journalism, and other writing, so that he described himself in Who's Who as "special correspondent, dramatist, and author".

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