Arthur Quiller-Couch - Life

Life

Quiller-Couch was born at Bodmin in Cornwall to the union of two ancient local families, the Quiller family and the Couch family, and was the third in line of intellectuals from the Couch family. His younger sisters Florence Mabel and Lilian M. were also writers and folklorists. His father, Dr. Thomas Quiller Couch (d. 1884), was a noted physician, folklorist and historian. His grandfather, Jonathan Couch, was an eminent naturalist, also a physician, historian, classicist, apothecary, and illustrator (particularly of fish) in the style of the time. His son, Bevil Brian Quiller-Couch, was a war hero and poet, whose romantic letters to his fiancée, the poet May Wedderburn Cannan, were published in Tears of War. He also had a daughter, Foy Felicia, to whom Kenneth Grahame inscribed a first edition of his The Wind in the Willows attributing Quiller-Couch as the inspiration for the character Ratty, auctioned by Bonhams on Tuesday 23 March 2010 for £32,400.

He was educated at Newton Abbot Preparatory College, at Clifton College, and Trinity College, Oxford and later became a lecturer there. On taking his degree in 1886 he was for a short time classical lecturer at Trinity. After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, in 1891 he settled at Fowey in Cornwall.

In Cornwall he was an active worker in politics for the Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1910, and in 1928 was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight'). He was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death.