Dudley Maurice Newitt, 28 April 1894 - 14 March 1980

Abstract

The interleaved texture of human growth can sometimes be followed back to more than one kind of early experience, and often stems from more than one genetic element. Subtle and continuous elements affecting the life of Dudley Newitt came from his youthful experience and from his parentage. These had superimposed upon them uncommon events which helped to segment his life into strongly marked periods. In his origins Newitt was basically a Fen-man. His father’s great grandfather was a moderately prosperous farmer in Chatteris on the Isle of Ely, of which he was at one time High Constable. Dudley’s tenacity and toughness were characteristic of the Fens, though he was not without a romantic streak. When we visited Ely and its cathedral together in the 1950s it was not fanciful in me to observe the quickening of his countenance. But his own grandfather had left the Fens in search of his fortune when barely grown up—walking to London, eating vegetables from the fields. He married the daughter of an ironmonger in Ware in whose shop he found his first job on leaving the Fens. In typical Victorian entrepreneurial pattern for the industrious apprentice, he subsequently built racecourses, managed hotels, speculated in land in England and in South Africa, made a small fortune and lost two. Newitt’s maternal grandparents were a craftsman in Windsor who is reputed to have made the leather upholstery for Queen Victoria’s state coaches, and the daughter of a small farmer from the Welsh border country.