Leo Walmsley (Leo Lionel Walmsley) Biography

British regional novelist, born in Shipley, West Yorkshire. His semi-autobiographical novels Foreigners (1935) and The Sound of the Sea (1959) are set in a fictional ‘Bramblewick’ which closely resembles Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire where Walmsley spent much of his childhood. His service in East Africa during the First World War resulted in his war memoir, Flying and Sport in East Africa (1920). He is best known for his realistic novels about Yorkshire fishermen and their families, including Phantom Lobster (1933), Sally Lunn (1937, adapted for the stage by Walmsley in 1944), and, notably, Three Fevers (1932), which was filmed as Turn of the Tide (1936), the first picture made by J. Arthur Rank. His later novels, largely autobiographical, and deeply sensitive to landscape and seascape, include Love in the Sun (1939), The Happy Ending (1957), Paradise Creek (1963), and Angler's Moon (1965). So Many Loves (1944) is his autobiography. See Peter J. Woods, The Honey-Gatherers: Leo Walmsley and the Autobiographical Novel (1991).