Western Front Association (Milton Keynes Branch)
Friday, 15th March 2024 from 7.30 to 9.30 pm
Wolverton Working Men’s Social Club, 49-50 Stratford Road, Wolverton MK12 5LS
When Robert Keable’s First World War novel Simon Called Peter was published, critics called it ‘offensive’, ‘a libel’ and reeking of ‘drink and lust’. Despite this the novel became a huge international best-seller, a Broadway play, and the sequel, a Hollywood movie, making its author a celebrity. What critics did not know was that the novel, about a military chaplain and a young woman having an affair during the war, was autobiographical.
Simon Keable-Elliott has used letters, books, articles, interviews and a trip to Tahiti to produce a fascinating account of the remarkable true story of his grandfather, from his studies at Cambridge, missionary work in Africa, and war experience as chaplain to the black labourers of the SANLC, where, dispirited by the appallingly treatment of his men, the horrors of the war and the implications of his secret affair, he lost his faith and eventually escaped to Tahiti.