Notable Residents/natives
It was home, until her death, of the actress Joan Hickson who played Miss Marple in the BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's novels, and children's writer Leila Berg. It is also home of the poet and musician Martin Newell.
It was once a favourite watering-hole of the painter Francis Bacon, whose house on Queens Road still remains as it was when he died, and several journalists and writers have been based in the lower end of the town: George Gale (former editor of The Spectator, Daily Telegraph cartoonist and Daily Express columnist) parodied by Private Eye magazine as 'George G. Ale', and Peregrine Worsthorne, (former editor of the Sunday Telegraph) both had homes there.
Anna Mendelson, a writer (as 'Grace Lake'), poet and political activist was a resident of Wivenhoe and a student at Essex University. She was associated with the short-lived British terrorist organisation the Angry Brigade.
Actor-manager Sir John Martin-Harvey was born in the village in 1863 and is commemorated by a blue plaque on Quay House, one of his childhood homes. He was the son of yacht-designer John Harvey and grandson of Thomas Harvey, yacht builder. The Volante was built by Thomas Harvey & Son (Thomas & Thomas Harvey junior) in the Halifax Yard at Ipswich. The "Volante" competed in the first America's Cup in 1851.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Wivenhoe Hall was the home of William Brummell, brother of the more famous Beau Brummell.
Harry Bensley became famous for taking on a wager to walk around Britain and eighteen other countries while wearing an iron mask and pushing a perambulator. Bensley lived in the village with his wife, Kate, after having served in the First World War.
Wivenhoe also became the adopted home of Louis Claiborne. Mr. Claiborne served as a U.S. Deputy Solicitor General from 1962 to 1985, presented oral argument in over 70 cases to the United States Supreme Court and is regarded as "one of the single most important lawyers in environmental law's formative years in the Court." Additionally, Claiborne was noted for being one of only a few American lawyers to have been admitted as an English barrister, and also for being one of even a smaller number of English barristers to have argued before the United States Supreme Court.
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Famous quotes containing the words notable, residents and/or natives:
“a notable prince that was called King John;
And he ruled England with main and with might,
For he did great wrong, and maintained little right.”
—Unknown. King John and the Abbot of Canterbury (l. 2–4)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Here was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and the ambition of the woods,... but there seemed to me, as usual, a preponderance of children’s toys,—dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where natives there hardly are yet. As if a child born into the Maine woods, among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young Rothschild has.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)