Hut - Mgr. Powys, Kisima

Author of novels about the British Empire

Worked on Will Powys' farm 1934-9

One of the original '500' men in the Kenya Regt. in 1937. (KR 227). Satirised Timau Club life in the late 1930s in "The Drinkers of Darkness" which appeared in 1954.

Obit in the Independent 3 Oct 1992 Gerald Hanley, writer, born 17 February 1916, died Dun Laoghaire Co Dublin 7 September 1992. THROUGHOUT his career as a writer Gerald Hanley suffered from the fact that it was his first novel, The Consul at Sunset, published in 1951, which garnered the critical plaudits. Nothing after seemed to them to indicate progress or a new dimension. There is no doubt that Hanley's writing stemmed from his own experiences. He left Ireland for East Africa at the age of 19; he saw Kenya at its colonial best and worst, and Somaliland falling prey to Italian invasion; he fought during the Second World War in Africa and Burma (his first book, Monsoon Victory, 1946, was an account of that 1944 Burma campaign, seen through the eyes of a war correspondent); he was greatly influenced by Indian philosophy and religion, and by a strong conviction that so-called Western 'civilisers' often brought insensitivity and arrogance in their well-meaning luggage. After the war, Hanley worked for a time for the J. Arthur Rank film organisation in India and Pakistan, and for the World Service of the BBC, but he disliked the discipline of regular employment. Publication of The Consul at Sunset, a brilliant picture of a colonial outpost in Ethiopia and of a man of integrity seeking an honourable course between justice and expediency, changed his life. Subsequent novels, The Year of the Lion (1954), Drinkers of Darkness (1955), The Journey Homeward (1961) and Gilligan's Last Elephant (1962), three set in Africa and one India, continued to dwell on the mysteries and fantasies of the colonial world.

Wikipedia Hanley, born on 17 February 1916 in Liverpool (not County Cork, Ireland, as he claimed), was the youngest of a large, Irish-Liverpudleian Catholic family. Both his working class parents were from Ireland, his father Edward from Dublin, his mother Bridget from Cobh, County Cork, but were married in Liverpool in 1891.His father Edward was a seaman, especially on Cunard liners, but he also some times worked on shore. In 1934 Gerald went to East Africa, where he worked on a farm in Kenya until the war in 1939.This was arranged with the help of his brother James' friend John Cowper Powys, whose brother William farmed in Kenya. Joining the King's African Rifles of the British army on the outbreak of the Second World War, Hanley served in Somalia and in Burma, where Monsoon Victory (1946) is set.Prior to this he had had a few short stories published. While he published a number of novels he also wrote radio plays for the BBC as well as some film scripts, most notably The Blue Max (1966). He was also one of several script writers for a life of Gandhi (1964). Parts of his script were used for the Richard Attenborough film Gandhi (see Attenborough's book on the subject). In 1950, Hanley went to the Punjab in India,^[10] and he also lived in Srinagar, Pakistan, where he was married to Asha Weymiss, a Brahmin woman who had been adopted as a child by an English woman working in India. He settled in County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1954 with his first wife, Diana Fittall (some sources give a later date).He is survived by 7 children with Diana and two with Asha.

His brother was the novelist and playwright James Hanley, while the American novelist and playwright William Hanley was his nephew. William's sister Ellen Hanley was a successful Broadway actress. Gerald Hanley died on 7 September 1992, in Dun Leaoghaire, Ireland.

Dictionary of Irish Biography Hanley, Gerald (1916–92), writer, was born 17 February 1916 in Cork, younger son of Edward Hanley, merchant seaman, and Brigid Hanley (née Roche). His father had forsaken an established family printing business and legal studies to go to sea (and adding an ‘e’ to his original surname, Hanly); his mother hailed from a long line of seafarers. This self-reliance was carried through to the next generation: Gerald's older brother, the writer James Hanley (qv), ran off to sea at age 13, and Gerald himself left home at 16 to take up farming in Kenya. At the outbreak of war in 1939 Hanley joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers and saw service in Somaliland, where conditions were so difficult that seven fellow-officers committed suicide. He was then in Burma with the 11th East Africa Division as a war correspondent, and took part in a campaign at Khabaw valley which led to establishing a bridgehead at Kalewa to open the way to Mandalay. He drew on this to write his first novel, Monsoon victory (1946).

After the war he worked for the press agency J. Arthur Rank in India and for the BBC overseas service in Pakistan; but he did not much enjoy this work, and in 1950 settled in a thatched cottage in Palumpar in the Himalayas, where he lived frugally and wrote Consul at sunset (1951). Generally held to be his best novel, it deals with British colonial officers’ handling of an African tribal dispute over a waterhole, and is distinguished by Hanley's terse unsentimentality. His next two novels were also set in Africa and well reviewed, but The journey homeward (1961) and his last novel, Noble descent (1982), deal with Indian and Pakistani independence, and are weaker works. He used Africa as his subject again for the travel book, Warriors and strangers (1971), one of the best European attempts to describe the experience of living in Africa. In the late 1960s he returned to Ireland and settled in Wicklow, where he wrote scripts and radio plays as well as novels. His most famous screenplay was for the film The Blue Max (1966), about German pilots in the first world war, directed by John Guillermin and filmed in Ireland. He was also one of the many scriptwriters on Richard Attenborough's Ghandi (1982). After 1982 he published no more, and died 7 September 1992 in Dublin. He was survived by his companion, Kate Carney.

Hanley is very much a mid-twentieth-century author, whose unvarying theme is the dissolution of empire, and the social, political, and personal tensions this creates for the subject and colonial people. He was inevitably compared to Graham Greene, and was admired by Hemingway. His nine novels enjoyed moderately good reviews. Though he never gained the critical acclaim of his brother James, he probably had better sales. His work does not rise to the bleak, uncompromising despair of his brother's, but is not dissimilar in its unsentimentality, its clear, unvarnished prose, and its sense of alienation.