Doug Gresham

I have listened to him being interviewed a few times in the last year, and he has clearly told the story enough that there are no extraneous parts at this point. The story in the churchyard is powerful, even in this abbreviated version. In one interview he talked about his older brother David. I had heard of him, and read that he had become as emphatically Jewish as Doug was Christian and identified more with his mother's family. I thought that interesting, but only later learned that he was deeply psychotic and had to be confined in asylums because of his violence for months at a time. Doug related that David had tried to kill him several times - once as a child, holding him under the water in an attempt to drown him; dousing him with petrol by surprise and trying to bring a flame to him. Joy apologised at the end for not believing Douglas. With Doug in Tasmania and David in a Swiss psychiatric hospital, they did not see each other much in the last years. 

Doug surprised me when he said warmly. "He died a few years ago.  I miss him."

 

I read Lenten Lands, his biography from the 1980s and liked it quite a bit.  I wasn't much interested in the last few chapters, of agricultural college, meeting his wife, and going to Tasmania. The last years of Warnie are quite sad.  Jack's brother was an important Inkling himself, and an historian in his own right who had a multi volume series on France. There were years in the 40s when the usual attendance at an Inklings meeting was only Jack, Warnie, and Charles Williams.  Attendance ebbed and flowed, which makes me feel better about my own pub night which has been going on for years. Attendance is often sparse.

After Jack's death Warnie drank even more than he had before, disappearing for weeks at a time and not caring for himself at all. He outlived Jack by ten years and is buried under the same stone, with the quote from Act V of King Lear "Men must endure their going hence."