G. W. Lyttelton

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George William Lyttelton (6 January 1883 – 1 May 1962) was a British teacher and littérateur.

The Hon George William Lyttelton was the second son of Charles Lyttelton, the fifth Lord Lyttelton and later eighth Viscount Cobham, and the Hon Mary Susan Caroline Cavendish. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Though he is now remembered for his literary work, he was a sporting young man. He did not set a record in minor cricket, but made a proxime accessit of 476 for the second wicket in partnership with M. R. H. M. Herbert for A. C. Benson's XI v H. V. MacNaughton's XI (Eton, 1901).

At Cambridge, Lyttelton was a distinguished putter of the shot, winning the annual event for Trinity three years in a row (1904, 37'7; 1905, 37'11 and 1906, 38'3 ¾). He was a less distinguished amateur musician: according to a contemporary university magazine, 'When George Lyttelton practises the cello, all the cats in the district converge upon his rooms in the belief that one of their members is in distress.'

After graduation he returned to Eton as a master. He married Pamela Marie Adeane, daughter of Charles Robert Whorwood Adeane and Madeline Pamela Constance Blanche Wyndham, on 3 April 1919. They had four daughters and one son – the latter being the celebrated jazz trumpeter and radio presenter Humphrey Lyttelton.

George Lyttelton's entire career was at Eton, from which he retired in 1945, having taught, among others, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, J. B. S. Haldane and John Bayley.

His life would not have come to the notice of the wider world were it not for his weekly correspondence with a former pupil, Rupert Hart-Davis, which lasted from 1955 until Lyttelton’s death in 1962. This correspondence, published after Lyttleton’s death as The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, was an immediate literary success and eventually ran to six volumes. Reviewers contrasted Hart-Davis’s weekly accounts of a busy urban life with Lyttelton’s detached, and often humorous, observations from his retirement in Suffolk. The Daily Telegraph said of them ‘In a hundred years’ time, I suspect, the letters will be read with as much pleasure as they are today…This is a book one could go on quoting forever.’

In 2002 Lyttelton’s commonplace book was edited and published, confirming how broad and unconventional his literary interests were, ranging from Greek and Latin classics to quirky advertisements and press cuttings – not all of them fit for publication, as his son Humphrey makes clear in the foreword to the commonplace book.

[edit] References

  • The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published by John Murray, 1978 to 1984.
  • George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, edited by James Ramsden, published by Stone Trough Books, 2002.
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