Name Alfred Duggan Role Novelist | Education Eton College | |
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Died 1964, Ross-on-Wye, United Kingdom Books Winter Quarters, Count Bohemond, Conscience of the King, Knight With Armour, The Little Emperors | ||
Alfred Duggan (1903–1964) was a British historian, archeologist and best-selling historical novelist during the 1950s.
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Life
Although he was raised in England, Duggan was born Alfredo León Duggan in Lomas de Zamora Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of wealthy landowners of Irish descent. His family moved to England when he was two years old. His father Alfredo Huberto Duggan, a first generation Irish Argentinian, was appointed in 1905 to the Argentine Legation in London, and died in 1915. In 1917, his mother, the Alabama-born Grace Elvira Hinds, daughter of the U.S. Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, became the second wife of Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India. Duggan and his brother Hubert (1904–1943) were raised in England at Curzon's seats, and were educated, first at Wixenford and Eton, then Oxford University, where they became acquainted with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.
Alfred Duggan kept a car while at Oxford, one of the few students with sufficient funding and influence to do this; the University Statutes prohibited undergraduate members of the University from keeping a car within a certain distance of the town centre at Carfax, so Duggan kept his vehicle, an early Rolls-Royce, just outside the limit of the jurisdiction of the University Proctors, and would regularly drive himself and his friends to and from London during the social season.
During 1938–41, Duggan served with the London Irish Rifles, with active service in the Norwegian Campaign. For the rest of World War II he worked in an airplane factory.
Literature
Duggan's novels are known for being based on meticulous historical research. He also wrote popular histories of Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages. Knight With Armour was his first novel, written in 1946. He visited practically every place and battlefield described in the book, because he was also an archaeologist, having worked on excavations in Istanbul during the 1930s.
Unlike many historical novelists, he does not idealise his subjects. A few of the characters are noble, some rather nasty, many mixed in their motives. Some of the novels can be seen as funny, in a dry and noirish style. A recurring theme is the slow moral corruption of a character who begins with an exalted opinion of himself as noble, wise and brave but who gradually compromises himself morally.
Most of the stories are told from the viewpoint of the ruling class, sometimes the ruler and sometimes a knight or noble. In English history, his novels show a general approval of the Norman conquest.