Perceval Landon

"Thurnley Abbey".

Family

His first name was the surname of his mother, daughter of the Rev. and Hon. A P Perceval, through whom he was related to Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister ever to have been assassinated. His own family of Landon was of French Huguenot descent, having migrated to London in the 1680s at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Life and career

Perceval Landon was born in 1868 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he was one of the original subscribers to Woodward’s "Treatise on Heraldry British and Foreign" (1892), and he had a lifelong interest in heraldry.

He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple but in 1899–1900 he was War Correspondent to The Times during the South African War. He was also involved, with his close and lifelong friend Rudyard Kipling and others, in a daily paper edited by Lord Roberts in Bloemfontein called "The Friend". This South African adventure launched a career of world travel, journalism, and other writing, so that he described himself in Who's Who as "special correspondent, dramatist, and author".

He was private secretary to the Governor of New South Wales 1900; in 1903 he was special correspondent of the Daily Mail at the Delhi Durbar, in China, in Japan and in Siberia; in 1903–1904 he was special correspondent of The Times on an expedition to Lhasa, Tibet; in 1905–1906 he was special correspondent of The Times for the Prince of Wales' visit to India; and after that he was in Persia, India, and Nepal, 1908; Russian Turkestan 1909; Egypt and Sudan 1910; on the North Eastern Frontier of India and at the Delhi Durbar, 1911; in Mesopotamiaand Syria, 1912; in Scandinavia and behind the British and French lines in 1914-1915; behind the Italian Lines in 1917; at the Peace Conference in Paris, 1919; in Constantinople, 1920; in India, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine 1921; on the Prince of Wales' tour of India and Japan, 1921-1922; in China and North America 1922; at the Peace Conference in Lausanne, 1923; in China, Nepal and Egypt 1924; and in China in 1925 (source: Who Was Who).

By this time, he was 57 and had travelled constantly since the age of 21. He died unmarried on 23 January, 1927.

Publications

As well as his journalism, Perceval Landon published the following books:

*Heliotropes, or New Posies for Sundials, written in an old book partly in English and partly in Latin (1908)
*Lhasa: an account of the country and people of Central Tibet (1905)
*Under the Sun: impressions of Indian cities (1906)
*1857, The Story of the Indian Mutiny (1907)
*Raw Edges; studies and stories of these days (1908)
*The House Opposite (n.d.)
*For the Soul of the King (translated from the French, 1909)
*Nepal (1928).

Thurnley Abbey

Perceval Landon's ghost story "Thurnley Abbey" was originally published in 1908 in his book "Raw Edges", above. It is reprinted in many modern anthologies, such as "The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories" and "The Penguin Book of Horror Stories".

It is now in the public domain and may be read on the internet [http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/thurnley.htm here] or, in pdf format, [http://horrormasters.com/Text/a0609.pdf here] .