Edward Keble Chatterton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Keble Chatterton in Dordrecht, Holland - 1910

Edward Keble Chatterton (September 10, 1878 - December 31, 1944) was a prolific writer who published around a hundred books, pamphlets and magazine series, mainly on maritime and naval themes.

[edit] Biography

Born at number 76, Rock Street, Sheffield, England, he attended St Paul's School, then located in Hammersmith, London. He took a B.A. at Oxford before beginning to write theatre and art reviews for various magazines. In 1905, he edited The Lady's Realm [1] for a number of issues.

He undertook a number of small-boat voyages through the English Channel and the Netherlands; out of these voyages came magazine articles [2] and books describing the passages as well as several books on the maritime art collections of the Low Countries.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Chatterton joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (R.N.V.R.), ultimately commanding a Motor Launch flotilla [3] at Queenstown, now Cobh, in Ireland. He describes these years in Q-Ships and their Story (1922), The Auxiliary Patrol (1924) and Danger Zone: The Story of the Queenstown Command (1934). He left the service in 1919 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

In the inter-war years, his output was continuous, and included a series of monographs on model ships, many narrative histories of naval events, and a number of juvenile novels. Most of his books were republished in the United States and several were translated into French and German editions.

A member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club for many years, he carried out a multi-season voyage to the Mediterranean through the French canals. He described these in a further series of books: his journeys on the Canal de Nantes à Brest are outlined in Through Brittany in Charmina: From Torbay to the Bay of Biscay in a 6-Tonner (1933), journeys on the Canal du Midi are described in To the Mediterranean in Charmina (1934), and journeys along the French Riviera are described in Charmina on the Riviera (1937).

After 1939, his writings focused on the conflict with Germany. Hutchinsons published a series documenting the Royal Navy at war, which was completed by Kenneth Edwards following Chatterton's death in 1944.