Daphne Vigers

Daphne Vigers (fl. 1940s-1960s)

The 1944 Andrew Dakers edition

Daphne Vigers published only two editions of one book, Atlantis Rising (London: Andrew Dakers, 1944; second edition London: Aquarian Press, 1952). The dust-wrapper to the reprint gives what little biographical information is known about the author, noting that as a young woman in her twenties she “went though a series of extraordinary experiences in which she witnessed the scenes of a long vanished land”. Her quasi-novel tells of the earthly paradise of Atlantis, and of the “final cataclysm in which the whole land sank beneath the Atlantic Ocean”.  The book describes Vigers’s visits, by psychic projection, to ancient Atlantis, and also to the future when Atlantis will have risen again above the waves.  Vigers declares that the British race is descended from the noble Atlanteans who did not fall victim to the black magic of renegade priests. In all, though presented as a novel, this book is more of an occult tract.

The 1952 Aquarian Press edition

Vigers apparently wrote at least two other unpublished works. Bernard Miall (1876-1953) served as publisher’s reader in late 1941 for an earlier novel, City of Terrible Nights, about the blitzkrieg of London.  He called it “an artless, spontaneous, unaffected novel, with occasional paragraphs or pages of comment, shrewd or commonplace, but apparently individual.” Another book was Wingless Flight, for which John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982) completed twenty-two drawings, under the pseudonym “Thot”, intended to be published with the book.  Their captions indicate the visionary nature of the text, which apparently no longer survives.

 Vigers was listed as living in southwest London from 1947 thorough 1965, after which time she disappears from the public record. 

Alexander Townsend

Alexander Townsend (b. reg. Farnham, Surrey, July-September 1902; d. reg. Bridgwater, Somerset, January-March 1968)

Alexander Edward Townsend was the son of William Henry Townsend (1871-1963) and Margaret Ellen, née Benstead (1872-1961), who were married in Ireland in 1894.  He had two older brothers. He married Frances G. Jackman (1906-1992) in Newton Abbot, Devonshire, in late 1933, and they had one son.

The Heinemann dust-wrapper

            Very little is known of Townsend. In the probate report after his father’s death in 1963, his profession is given as “mechanical engineer.” His only known publication is the novel The Wooden Woman (London: William Heinemann, [June] 1930; New York:  Doubleday, Doran, [December] 1930).  It is a strange novel of retributive justice.  It concerns the last voyage of the ship Heaven Belle, when the descendents of the first crew come together in a reenactment of a tragedy of the first voyage forty years earlier. (The wooden woman of the title refers to the figurehead of the ship.) The plot is artificial and contrived, and the writing shows some flaws of the young first-time novelist, but the reviews of the original editions were fairly favorable, though tempered with some appropriate criticism.  The Times Literary Supplement noted that “Mr. Townsend writes with dramatic force, he can build up situations to a crescendo of terrific implications, but he is rather caught in the toils of his commitments. If Mr. Townsend does not quite succeed in an ingenious device, his talent can thrill the reader by horrific suggestion” (14 August 1930). L.A.G. Strong noted in The Spectator that “Mr. Townsend’s characters are crude, enormous symbols—like the Wooden Woman herself—not living men.  His story misses a universal quality because it is too violent, too fantastic, too full of deaths and ghostly voices. But it is a magnificent attempt” (12 July 1930).

One variant of the Doubleday, Doran dust-wrapper

The other variant of the Doubleday, Doran dust-wrapper

Godfrey Childe

Godfrey Childe  (b. Wakefield, West Yorkshire, 22 June 1901;  d. reg. Chichester, West Sussex, April-June 1970)

Godfrey Slade Childe was the youngest of four sons of Henry Slade Childe (1861-1925), a wealthy mining engineer and three time mayor of Wakefield (elected for the years 1901, 1904 and 1905), and his wife Kate, née France (1859-1945), who were married in Wakefield on 9 April 1889. Godfrey’s oldest brother was the poet Wilfred Rowland Childe (1890-1952), who converted to Catholicism in 1914.  Godfrey followed his older brother and also became Catholic. 

Little is known of Godfrey’s life.  He was educated at Repton, and in 1927 he published his only book, a novel Short Head: A Tale (London:  Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1927). It is dedicated to the memory of his brother Derrick Francis Childe (1896-1915), who was killed in action at Ypres during World War I. 

Short Head is a very odd book.  It tells the story of Antony Herrick, an agent to a country landowner, and his activities among, as one reviewer summed it up, “the kaleidoscopic world of race-meetings, cricket, motors, shoots, golf, music, estate-management, objets d’art, and sybaritism” (Blackfriars, January 1928). Thus it gives a vivid picture of English country life as enjoyed by a fortunate few. The Bookman noted aptly: “Antony Herrick, [the novel’s] hero, is such a fine gentleman that some would call him a prig and a snob and be not far out at times, but he had appeal, if not eventually, for Miss Anne Bullen, whom no reasonable person could blame for giving such a persnickety young man the go-by. Just think of a youth of twenty-four whose fads include James Joyce, cricket, shooting pheasants, dancing the Blues, double-breasted white waistcoats that always grip the shirt, little dinners at the Berkeley, rather heavy dealings with bookmakers, friendships with innumerable titled persons, and ancestral Jesuitical instincts of fanatical fervour. And all on £800 a year. No wonder Anne funked it” (October 1928).

Herrick, after Anne’s eventual rejection of his marriage proposal, finds consolation in his Catholic religion, giving the novel something more than its surface descriptive qualities.  Yet the religious dimension of the book is not without problems. The reviewer in Punch noted that Short Head is “a first novel of ability and I therefore hesitate to describe it as ‘written by a Catholic for Catholics.’ It deserves a wider public than that, and yet I must warn the Protestant reader that Mr. Godfrey Childe will irritate him by his attitude of calm superiority towards the poor benighted creatures who are still outside the fold” (22 February 1928).  Yet a Catholic review stated that “Mr. Childe, like his hero, is ‘an artist at heart, and so well-bred’ that he aquits himself fairly creditably on thin ice. This good breeding is indubitably Catholic, and one feels that it saves the book from being merely an effort at ‘smartness.’ Fashionable cynicism is defeated by the sanity of Catholic philosophy” (Blackfriars, January 1928). To the present-day reader, it is this imperfect blend of modernism and Catholic theology that make the novel ultimately unsatisfactory.

Childe’s other writings include four essays for The Bookman (“A Plea for Some Reprints” October 1931; “The Ideal of Peace in the Nineteenth Century” December 1931; “A Bibliography of the French Exhibition” January 1932; and a follow-up to the first article, also titled “A Plea for Some Reprints” June 1932), and a contribution to The New Forget-Me-Not: A Calendar (London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1929), published for the year 1930.  Godfrey Childe was the literary executor for his brother Wilfred, and with Wilfred’s student, the poet Robin Skelton (1925-1997), they began a memorial volume of Wilfred Childe’s poems.  This was completed as The Crystal Tree: A Selection from the Poems of Wilfred Rowland Childe, 1890-1952, edited by Skelton and Margaret Snow, but the book was never published.

Godfrey Childe married Elsie B. Ashbolt in Chelsea in late 1933.  They had no children. 

F. S. Winger

F. S. Winger (b. Clay Lick, Pennsylvania, 24 January 1865; d. Chicago, Illinois, 5 March 1936)

Frank Stover Winger was the second of five sons of Elam Buckwalter Winger (1837-1904), a merchant,  and Barbara Elizabeth Stover (1841-1891).  Around 1889, in Chicago, he married his cousin May Porter Stover (1873-1944), the daughter of the wealthy Daniel Stover (1839-1908), who manufactured many things including a full line of Stover-brand gasoline engines, and the famous Henney buggy, from Freeport, Illinois.  Frank Winger and his wife would have one daughter, Clare M. Winger (1891-1968), and one son, Stover Carl Winger (1893-1969).  Under her married name, his daughter Clare Winger Harris became a pioneering woman writer of science fiction. Sometime around the beginning of World War I, Frank and his wife divorced, and later Frank married Emma May Finfrock (1871-1950), the widow of Louis Price Bennett (1866-1915) and mother of three adult sons.

Frank Stover Winger's only known writing is the short "pseudo-scientific novel," The Wizard of the Island or The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger (Chicago: Winger Publishing Company, 1917), which was presumably self-published, as there is no record of any other publication put out by the Winger Publishing Company.  The novel is dedicated to the memory of the author's older brother, Oswalt Emmert Winger (1862-c.1910?), from whose middle name is derived the surname of the character Jack Emmert.  Set a hundred years in the future, Professor Waldinger, who disappeared ten years earlier, had rejected atomic energy. On a small volcanic island in the south Pacific, Waldinger developed steam power so as to regulate the flow of the ether.  As his former rival Professor Turner flies nearby in a giant aircraft (piloted by Jack Emmert), Waldinger brings the plane down to show off his accomplishments. Later, the volcano explodes killing both Waldinger and Turner, so that Waldinger's discoveries are lost, but Waldinger's daughter and Jack Emmert have escaped with their lives.

E. F. Bleiler gives a lengthy description of the plot of the novel in his Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990), concluding accurately that it is "amateurish." Perhaps the primary quality of the book is that it may have been a source of inspiration for Clare Winger Harris's early interest in science fiction.

Robert T. Griebling

Robert T. Griebling (b. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 9 November 1901; d. Tarentum, Pennsylvania, 1959)

Robert Theodore Griebling was the oldest of three sons (three daughters died in infancy) of Oscar Griebling (1858-1928) and Louise Dammann (1867-1934), who were married in Milwaukee on 12 May 1897. Both parents were the children of German immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin. Oscar Griebling worked in insurance, and his wife Louise was a school teacher.

Robert T. Griebling in 1922

Robert T. Griebling and his brothers grew up speaking German at home, where they read Grimms fairy tales and other German stories, including tales of the Rübezahl, and Struwwelpeter. Robert attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, studying journalism and graduating in 1922.  His thesis was on James Gibbon Huneker as a dramatic critic.  He married Mary H. Hughes (1902-1989) on 29 January 1927, and they settled near Pittsburgh, where Mary Griebling worked as a school teacher, and Robert T. Griebling worked in business.  

Some of  Griebling’s early writings were included in the “Little Blue Book” series published by Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas. These include the title essay of Snyder-Gray Murder Echoes (1928), and pieces on “The Greek Letter System” in The Revolt of Modern Youth (1928) and “On the Correcting of the Plebs’ in Small Town Humor (1929).  One single short story, “A Wager in Candlesticks,” was published in Weird Tales magazine for May 1928. It is derivative of Richard Connell’s famous story “The Most Dangerous Game,” which had appeared in Collier’s Weekly for 19 January 1924 and which was filmed successfully in 1932.  Griebling’s variation has a Russian aristocrat killing people in candlestick duels.  After this Griebling apparently ceased publishing, until he collaborated with his two brothers on a pamphlet, The Story of Oscar Griebling on the Observance of the 100th Anniversary of His Birth, March 16, 1958 (1958), prepared as a memorial for the subjects grandsons.  The November, 1959, issue of Wisconsin Alumnus notes Robert T. Greibling’s passing. 

John Vasseur

John Vasseur (b. Worcester, Massachusetts, 22 September 1894; d. San Francisco, California, 14 March 1952)

Dust-wrapper art by Clifford Pyle

The only published book by John Vasseur is the novel Typhon's Beard (New York:  George H. Doran, 1927), which appeared in June of 1927. (A British edition followed soon afterwards from Allen & Unwin, made from sheets printed in the U.S.)  It tells the story of Pyrrhus, the idle and philandering son of Leonidas, a vineyard owner in the dullest province of Greece, who is sent off to explore the wider world.  The meandering plot takes Pyrrhus and his horse Heraclitus on a series of adventures, one of which is an encounter with Typhon, "the ugliest of all giants", who teaches Pyrrhus to stretch himself to giant-size and together they wander the empyrean. The prose in the novel has a light ironic touch which is mildly diverting, but otherwise the book lacks any depth or substance.

“John Vasseur” was the pseudonym of Chandler Parks Barton, the only child of Herbert Parks Barton (1866-1925) and his wife Frances Johnstone Vasseur (1867-1922), who were married in Brooklyn, New York, on 18 October 1890.  Herbert Parks Barton was a surgeon, and a great-great-nephew of Clara Barton (1821-1912), the founder of the American Red Cross. In the late 1890s, the Barton family settled in California, and in 1904, Herbert Parks Barton organized the Clara Barton Hospital in Los Angeles. Barton served as an administrator at the hospital until his death.

Chandler Barton at Berkeley

Chandler P. Barton grew up in Los Angeles, and attended the University of California in Berkeley, receiving an A.B. in 1916, and an M.A. in philosophy in December 1917.  For the latter, Barton’s thesis was on “Individualism and the State: A Comparison of Hegel and Plato.” Barton also served in World War I. In the 1920s, he contributed a small number of short stories to various magazines, including All-Story Weekly, Argosy All-Story Weekly, and Munsey’s Magazine. His mother died in an automobile accident in October 1922, and his father died three years later to the month. The pseudonym under which he published his novel, “John Vasseur,” was derived from his mother’s middle and maiden names. He married a Pasadena society girl, Mary Joyce, in 1928, but the marriage did not last long. In the 1940s, he worked as a checker for the U.S. Government at Pier 45, San Francisco. Barton died in 1952 at the age of  fifty-seven, and is buried in the Golden Gate National Cemetery, San Bruno, California.

NB: Thanks to Dave Goudsward for identifying the writer behind the pseudonym.