Alex E. Urquhart

Alex E. Urquhart (b. Scotland, 4 August 1900; d. Wales, 29 March 1997)

21st Year (1928)

A tale of piracy on the China Sea

Alexander Ernest Urquhart settled in Cardiff in 1932, and remained there the rest of his long life.  Earlier he had done some writing for the Boys Annuals published in the 1920s by Oxford University Press.  Initially, Urquhart had been given plots to write out by the prolific Walter C. Rhoades (1860-1927), with the stories appearing under Rhoades's name;  but a small number of stories were published under Urquhart's own name in The Oxford Annual for Boys: 20th Year (1927) and The Oxford Annual for Boys: 21st Year (1928), and The Great Book for Boys (1930), all edited by Herbert Strang. After moving to Cardiff, Urquhart met and became a close friend of the great Welsh fantasist and theosophist, Kenneth Morris (1879-1937).  He was Morris's literary executor and saw to the preservation of Morris's manuscripts, like the novel The Chalchiuhite Dragon (finished 1935, published 1992). In his later years he assisted scholars working on Morris, and Urquhart was one of the two dedicatees of The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995).