Welch, Denton

British artist and writer.

English author.

Epithet: author

Maurice Denton Welch was born to Rosalind and Arthur Joseph Welch in Shanghai on March 29, 1915, the youngest of four sons. The maternal and paternal sides of the family had for a considerable period been successfully involved in commercial ventures in China, and the Welch sons were raised in comfortable circumstances. In 1924 Denton was sent, like his elder brothers, to England for schooling. Following his mother’s death in 1927 the bright but eccentric youth struggled with his mother’s loss and a feeling of alienation at school, culminating in his running away from Repton School in 1931.

Following a year spent, at his father’s suggestion, in Shanghai, Denton Welch returned to England in 1933 and enrolled in the Goldsmith School of Art in London. Two years later injuries received when he was struck by an automobile terminated his scholastic career and led to medical complications to which he eventually succumbed. After his discharge from a nursing home at Broadstairs, Kent in 1936 Denton Welch moved with housekeeper Evelyn Sinclair to rural western Kent, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

In his Kentish retirement Welch continued to paint and draw and had his first exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1941. From the first years of World War II Denton Welch also began to pursue, with increasing success, a literary career, initially publishing poems in literary magazines during 1941 and maintaining a journal.

His Sickert at St. Paul’s, an account of Welch’s meeting with the artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) during the early stages of his recuperation at Broadstairs, appeared in the August 1942 issue of Horizon, attracting (with Welch’s encouragement) the attention of Edith Sitwell. His autobiographical novel Maiden Voyage was accepted for publication by George Routledge and Sons, and, with Sitwell’s foreword and strong pre-publication review, was sold out before its May 1943 publication.

Welch’s arrival as a novelist during 1943 was followed by his introduction to Eric Oliver, who soon became his friend and life partner. As his health deteriorated in the mid-1940s Denton Welch worked as he was able to finish a second novel, In Youth Is Pleasure (1945), as well as to continue writing short stories, several of which were collected in Brave and Cruel and Other Stories (1949). His last novel, A Voice through a Cloud, was unfinished at his death on December 30, 1948, but eventually appeared in print in 1950.