Robert Gittings

Robert William Victor Gittings CBE (1 February 1911 – 18 February 1992), was an English writer, biographer, BBC Radio producer, playwright and poet. In 1978, he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Older Hardy.

Born at Southsea, the son of Surgeon-Captain Fred Claude Bromley Gittings and his wife Dora Mary, née Brayshaw, the young Gittings was educated at St Edward's School, Oxford, where he was taught by George Mallaby, and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he arrived in 1930 with a scholarship, gaining a First in 1933. He later wrote the article on George Mallaby in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

While still at school he published poems and thus encountered Christopher Fry, a lifelong friend. At the University of Cambridge, he was encouraged by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse, whose rooms in college were near his, and in 1931 he was awarded the Chancellor's gold medal for English verse.

In 1933, Gittings was elected a research fellow of Jesus College and became a history supervisor in 1938.

In 1940. he took a job with BBC Radio as a producer and writer, remaining with the Corporation twenty-three years. He made broadcasts for schools, dramatizations of history and literary programmes, and contributed to radio programmes such as Poets and Poetry, World History Series, Poetry Now, and The World of Books.

He continued to write verse, and his first major book, Wentworth Place (1950), was well reviewed. History and poetry combined in him into the ability to bring the past to life. In all, he published twelve volumes of poetry.

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