Holroyd, Wilson and Hopkins

I am currently researching the lives and ideas of Stuart Holroyd, Colin Wilson and Bill Hopkins. They were all identified as Angry Young Men in the 1950s and it is that period in their lives that I’m most interested in; much still remains to be discovered about what they all got up to then.

It is hard, if not impossible, to study the history of anything without having some sort of agenda. Holroyd, Wilson and Hopkins are increasingly being marginalised in accounts of the Angry Young Men and I want to show how important they were in that “movement”. Although I have an agenda in studying them, I hope that my commitment to the truth is even stronger. Getting to the truth of what the Angry Young Men did and thought in the 1950s is no easy matter. Several of them wrote memoirs about that time, but these are not always reliable. Contemporaneous material is far more valuable than memoirs written long after the events they recount. I would love to hear from anyone with access to such material that might help me in my project such as letters, postcards, diaries and photographs. Please email me at antoni.dillerREMOVE@cantabREMOVE.net with information about what you have got. (I am also willing to help others researching the Angry Young Men on a quid pro quo basis.)

The so-called Tregerthen Horror

Colin Wilson moved to Cornwall in the spring of 1957. He lived in a cottage near Mevagissey for two years and then moved to nearby Gorran Haven. For years, I thought that Mevagissey was something of a cultural backwater, but then I came across Paul Newman's biography of the author Frank Baker who lived in Mevagissey for several years. Newman also mentions several other writers and artists who lived in the area. One of Baker’s novels discussed by Newman was Talk of the Devil (1956) which was a fictionalised account of the death of Ka Cox and, in discussing this novel, Newman mentions that he had written a whole book about that death. That sounded interesting, so I bought and read a copy of The Tregerthen Horror (2005). I became fascinated by the so-called Tregerthen Horror, but my research convinced me that the account of Ka Cox’s death contained in Newman book is completely false. I also became fascinated by one of the key characters in Newman’s book, namely Gerald Vaughan, and have extensively researched his life. I would love to hear from anyone who has information about Gerald and his wives Ellaline Agnes Norwood and Ingeborg Mendelsohn. I’m especially interested in Gerald’s early years and also in what he did after 1950 as I have been able to find out very little about these periods in his life. Please email me at antoni.dillerREMOVE@cantabREMOVE.net with information about what you have got. (I am also willing to help others researching Gerald Vaughan and the Tregerthen Horror on a quid pro quo basis.)

Other interests

Over the years, I have studied various topics that I found interesting, including Frege’s notion of an unsaturated expression, bracket abstraction algorithms in combinatory logic., Popper’s critical rationalism, Bartley’s pancritical rationalism and the epistemology of testimony. Look here for an overview of my other interests.