Frederick Grice

Frederick Grice
Born(1910-06-21)21 June 1910
Brandon, County Durham, England
Died8 February 1983(1983-02-08) (aged 72)
EducationKing's College, London
Durham University
OccupationsWriter, teacher
Writing career
LanguageEnglish
GenreChildren's literature
Notable workThe Bonny Pit Laddie (1960)

Frederick Grice (21 June 1910 – 8 February 1983) was a British author who specialised in children's literature. Grice wrote 20 books, the best known of which is The Bonny Pit Laddie (1960).

Early life and education

Born in Brandon and educated in Durham at Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, Grice read English at King's College, London (1928–1931), where he graduated with a first-class degree.[1]

He subsequently returned to Durham to complete his teacher training at the local university (1931–1932).[1][2] He was employed as an assistant master at A.J. Dawson School in County Durham from 1934 to 1940. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force as a Flight Lieutenant in a small mobile radar unit (Unit 606) that was attached to the Eighth Army in North Africa and operated out of a single lorry.[3][4]

Career

Set in the northern England of the 1920s, The Bonny Pit Laddie is the story of an aspirational teenage boy in a County Durham mining village experiencing a pit strike.[5] Standing out for its realism and "unsentimental" style, it was runner-up for the 1961 Carnegie Medal.[6][7][1] Working-class children's stories were notably rare at the time of its publication.[3]

Concurrent to his writing career, Grice lectured in English at Worcester Teacher Training College.[8] Before his death he had taken an interest in the clergyman diarist Francis Kilvert, which culminated in the publication of Francis Kilvert and his World.[1] Water Breaks Its Neck, a "simple but eventful" story of a shepherd boy set in the Radnorshire hills Grice became familiar with during his research on Kilvert, was published posthumously in 1986.[8]

In 2015, Grice's wartime diaries and notebooks were published as War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel During the Western Desert Campaign, 1942–3, edited by his daughter Gillian Clarke and her husband, Colin Clarke.[4]

Critical reception

For his body of work Grice received the 1977 Children's Rights Workshop Other Award.[9] His best known book, The Bonny Pit Laddie, was praised for being a story of the "ordinary working man" and featuring a "raw sense of injustice" reminiscent of Geoffrey Trease.[5]

As a writer, he was singled out for his ability to create interesting characters and atmosphere, though his plot construction and "maintenance of tension" was less successful.[8] He also received criticism for his perceived lack of interest in depicting female characters, especially in Aidan and the Strollers, which is a theatrical story set among a troupe of travelling actors and where the strong presence of an actress character might be expected.[8]

Personal

Grice married Gwendoline Simpson in 1939, with whom he had two daughters.[8] He was an active member of the Hatfield Association — the Hatfield College, Durham alumni society.[10]

He died on 8 February 1983.[8]

Selected publications

Fiction

  • Grice, Frederick (1960). Aidan and the Strollers. London: Jonathan Cape.
  • ——— (1960). The Bonny Pit Laddie (1st ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
  • ——— (1962). The Moving Finger. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192711953. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  • ——— (1964). A Severnside Story (1st ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
  • ——— (1968). The Oak and the Ash. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192712790.
  • ——— (1969). The Courage of Andy Robson (1st ed.). London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192712929.
  • ——— (1972). Young Tom Sawbones. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192713391.
  • ——— (1976). Nine Days' Wonder. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192713940.
  • ——— (1986). Water Breaks Its Neck. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192715357.

Non-fiction

  • Grice, Frederick (1967). Dildrum, King of the Cats, and Other English Folk Stories. London: Oxford University Press.
  • ——— (1982). Francis Kilvert and His World. London: Caliban. ISBN 9780904573787.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Frederick Grice". Colin & Gillian Clarke. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
  2. ↑ Grice, Frederick (2015). Clarke, Gillian (ed.). War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3. Casemate. p. 5.
  3. 1 2 Kirkpatrick, D.L., ed. (1983). Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. New York: St Martin's Press. pp. 340–341. ISBN 0312824149.
  4. 1 2 McGuirk, R. (2015). "Book Review: War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel During the Western Desert Campaign, 1942–3". Libyan Studies. 46: 175.
  5. 1 2 Fisher, Janet (2004). "Historical fiction". In Hunt, Peter (ed.). International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. Vol. 1 (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. p. 494. ISBN 9780415290548.
  6. ↑ Watson, Victor, ed. (2001). The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780521550642.
  7. ↑ Potter, Terry (August 2015). "The Bonny Pit Laddie". The Letterpress Project. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Frederick Grice". St. James Guide to Children's Writers. Detroit: Gale. 1999. Gale K1662000280.
  9. ↑ "Frederick Grice". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
  10. ↑ Metcalfe, Richard, ed. (March 1985). "Deaths". Hatfield Record. 4 (4): 12.
This page is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.