Did Gauguin inspire 1920s visitors to Tahiti?

Robert Keable lived in Paul Gauguin’s house in Tahiti for a year in 1923 twenty-five years after Gauguin had left the island for the last time. But who was Gauguin and how famous was he by 1923? Two recent excellent books, Wild Thing, A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux and Gauguin and Polynesia by Nicholas Thomas, have shed more light on the life of Gauguin. I am currently preparing a talk on American and British writers and artists who…

Out of the blue I received an email from Dr Iain Macdonald asking whether I knew of any connection between Robert Keable and his great uncle. Iain was in Tahiti launching his new book William Alister Macdonald, Watercolours from Thurso, the Thames and Tahiti about the life and work of the artist and he had just come across my book about my grandfather. In my ignorance I had never heard of the artist nor have I ever come across his name in connection with Robert Keable. But the similarities betw…

The truth is my book Utterly Immoral, which is published in November 2022, is the product of many years of research into the life of Robert Keable. Back in 2016 I visited Tahiti to find out as much as I could. One priority for me on that visit was to find the exact location of the French Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s house which Robert and Jolie Keable lived in for almost a year in 1923. I wrote about my search in a diary at the time.

Robert Keable loved driving along the coas…

Robert Keable claimed in the introduction to the American edition of Simon Called Peter that his intention was to ‘lift the veil’ on the life behind the lines during the war. He argued that the horror of war made men and women less restrained, ‘reckless’ and willing to throw ‘conventions to the winds’. And he suggested life in France was like the pages of La Vie Parisienne:

A man arrived, weary and dirty and craving for excitement, in some unknown town; in…

Robert Keable was a full-time writer for the last few years of his life having previously been a priest and rising star on the Anglo-Catholic section of the Church of England. However, he was also a historian and for four terms in the early 1920s a history teacher.

His father was a successful businessman who retrained as a priest, moving to Croydon at the turn of the century. Keable embraced his parents’ evangelical faith and threw himself into the life of the church, preaching in the…

Did Robert Keable teach at Dulwich College?

When I first started to research the life of Robert Keable almost 25 years ago, I began by reading his obituaries written back in 1927. All of them mentioned that he taught at Dulwich College in South London. I was surprised therefore when I came across a letter from the then archivist at the school WJ Wright to Dr Douglas dated 26^th October 1959.

I cannot find a trace of him, no mention in the Alleynian, nor is he included in the list of Assist…

Many of us have fond memories of our time as undergraduates at university and Robert Keable was no exception. He loved his time at Magdalene College, Cambridge and was proud to leave a trust fund to pay for poor students from his old school – Whitgift Grammar – to study history at the college. His best written novel, Peradventure, is a semi-autobiographical account of his time there. Little effort is made to disguise people or places. Paul Kestern’s upbringing and views are hi…

Introduction

Robert Keable, my grandfather, died aged just 40 in 1927. To say he led an unconventional life would be an understatement. He was born in London, won a scholarship to Cambridge University, was ordained as a Church of England priest, spent a year in Zanzibar as a member of the University Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), became a parish priest in Basutoland (Lesotho) and travelled to France as a padre in the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC). After returning from Fra…

Although I published my book on Robert Keable last November I still manage to stumble on new material about him. Only yesterday I came across a long article in the Literary Digest International Book Review by Fletcher Allen titled Keable – Novelist and Rebel, written in 1923.

The article runs through Keable’s career and goes over much of the same territory as in my book but there are some fascinating insights including an intriguing description of the man.

Fletcher Allen begin…

In my book Utterly Immoral I write about Robert Keable’s time in Zanzibar. He arrived on the island at the beginning of January 1912 taking up the post of vice-principle of St. Andrew’s College.

Keable – newly priested, having just finished a one-year curacy in Bradford – had joined the Universities Mission of Central Africa (UMCA), an organisation he had campaigned for ever since he heard Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, call for volunteers in a major speech at Cam…

On Friday 16th Decemebr 2022 my aricle on Robert Keable was published in the Church Times. You can see it online at:

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/16-december/features/features/a-scandalous-novel-that-changed-a-cleric-s-life