Robert Gittings - Private Life

Private Life

In 1934, Gittings married Katherine Edith Cambell, a Cambridge contemporary who had been at Girton College and was known as Kay, and they had two sons, called Robert and John, together, but this marriage ended in divorce. In 1949, he married secondly Joan Greville Manton, called Jo, who was a BBC colleague and also a biographer. They had one daughter. He had four great-grandsons, Robert, Oliver, Henry and Harry, and two great-granddaughters, Lucy and Sarah.

A tall man, Gittings had a high forehead and bald head, a warm personality and fine sense of humour. He played several sports, including cricket, squash, real tennis, and golf, and was still playing cricket in his seventies.

He died at Chichester on 18 February 1992, and was cremated.

Read more about this topic:  Robert Gittings

Famous quotes containing the words private life, private and/or life:

    In private life he was good-natured, chearful, social; inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals. He had a coarse, strong wit, which he was too free of for a man in his station, as it is always inconsistent with dignity. He was very able as a minister, but without a certain elevation of mind necessary for great good, or great mischief.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    One key, one solution to the mysteries of the human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)