Urquhart, Fred, 1912-1995

Frederick Burrows Urquhart was born on July 12, 1912, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is acknowledged as both a novelist and short story writer, but achieved recognition from his short stories. Urquhart also spent time editing and reviewing books. The constant theme of his stories centers upon the lives of ordinary people, especially violence and cruelty towards women.

His education took place in village schools in Scotland until 1927, when at fifteen he left school to work for a bookshop in Edinburgh. During this time he began to write his first novel. He left the bookstore to concentrate on his writing in 1935, and by 1938 this novel, Time Will Knit, was published. Because he was a declared pacifist, at the outbreak of World War II he was sent to work on the land. At this time, his first collection of short stories, I Fell for a Sailor ( 1940 ), was published, followed by his second collection of stories, The Clouds Are Big with Mercy ( 1946 ), and his two later novels, The Ferret Was Abraham’s Daughter ( 1949 ) and Jezebel’s Dust ( 1951 ). Further volumes of stories include The Year of the Short Corn ( 1949 ), The Last Sister ( 1950 ), The Laundry Girl and the People ( 1955 ), The Dying Stallion ( 1967 ), and The Ploughing Match ( 1968 ). His final works were the novel Palace of Green Days ( 1979 ), which drew upon his childhood in Perthshire where his father worked as a chauffeur, and a collection of short stories, A Diver in China Seas ( 1980 ).

In 1944 he began working at the estate of the Duke of Bedford . This gave him the opportunity to meet the Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and two literary notables, George Orwell and Rhys Davies . Starting in 1947, Urquhart began work as a reader for a London literary agency, and from 1951 - 1954 he worked as a script-reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer . He was also a reviewer for Time and Tide and other journals between 1947 and 1974 and a literary scout for Walt Disney Productions ( 1959 - 1960 ). As interest in the serious short story waned, he took on a number of editing tasks for works such as W.S.C.: A Cartoon Biography ( 1955 ), which consisted of political cartoons focusing on Winston Churchill, and Scottish Short Stories ( 1957 ).

In 1958 he moved to East Sussex with his companion, dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, but when Allen died in 1990 Urquhart moved back to Scotland and settled in Musselburgh. He died in Edinburgh on December 2, 1995 .