Alan Moorehead

Alan Moorehead (1910-1983), born on July 22, 1910, in Melbourne, Australia, and educated at Scotch College, with a BA from Melbourne University. He travelled to England in 1937 and became a renowned foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express. Writer, world traveller, biographer, essayist, journalist, Moorehead was one of the most successful writers in English of his day.[1] During World War II he won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in the Middle East and Asia, the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe. He was twice mentioned in dispatches and was awarded the OBE.

In 1956, his book Gallipoli about the Allies disastrous World War I campaign at Gallipoli, received almost unprecedented critical acclaim (though it was later criticized by the British Gallipoli historian Robert Rhodes James as "deeply flawed and grievously over-praised"). In England, the book won the Sunday Times thousand-pound award and gold medal was the first recipient of the Duff Cooper Memorial Award. The presentation of the latter was made by Sir Winston Churchill on November 28, 1956.

In 1966, Moorehead made his now annual visit to Australia, this time with his wife, younger son and daughter, he had completed a television script for his manuscript ‘Darwin and the Beagle’. Tragedy struck before the book was published. That December, suffering from headaches, he went into London’s Westminster Hospital for an angiogram which precipitated a major stroke. It was followed by an operation, in which brain damage occurred, affecting the communicating nerves. At 56, Moorehead, one of the great communicators of his time, could neither speak, read, nor write.

Through his talented wife Lucy, however, his writing voice went on. Darwin and the Beagle was brought out as a beautifully illustrated book in 1969 and, in 1972, Lucy Moorehead gathered together her husband’s scattered autobiographical essays and published them as A Late Education. It is also due largely to her administrative talent and commitment throughout her husband’s career that his private papers—his professional and personal correspondence, diaries, magazine and journal essays, press cuttings, book serialisations, reviews of his works, the background notes, drafts and proofs of his writings, and material relating to his unpublished writings—have been so comprehensively preserved. During the 1960s, two major American universities pressed Moorehead to deposit his private papers as a core in their collections of contemporary writers. Instead, in 1971, Alan and Lucy Moorehead brought his papers to Australia to present them in person to the National Library. [2]

Alan Moorehead died in London in 1983, and is buried at Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green.

Bibliography

• Gallipoli.
• The White Nile.
• The Blue Nile.
• No Room in The Ark.
• African Trilogy Comprising of Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle and The End of Africa.
• Eclipse a biography of General Montgomery.
• Montgomery.
• The Villa Diana.
• The Traitors.
• Rum Jungle.
• The Rage of the Vulture.
• A Summer Night.
• Russian Revolution.
• The Fatal Impact.
• The Russian Revolution.
• Cooper's Creek (About Australia). ^[1]
• A Late Education: Episodes in a life. Centres on his friendship during the Spanish Civil War and World War II with Alexander Clifford.

Related Links

• Pollinger, Ltd. - Alan Moorehead
• Alan Moorehead, A Rediscovery - Ann Moyal published by the National Library of Australia

Footnotes

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