Talbot Mundy


Talbot Mundy was an English writer of adventure fiction. Based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles and the Jimgrim series, much of his work was published in pulp magazines.
Mundy was born to a conservative middle-class family in Hammersmith, London. Educated at Rugby School, he left with no qualifications and moved to British India, where he worked in administration and then journalism. He relocated to East Africa, where he worked as an ivory poacher and then as the town clerk of Kisumu. In 1909 he moved to New York City where he lived in poverty. A friend encouraged him to start writing about his life experiences, and he sold his first short story to Frank Munsey's magazine, The Scrap Book, in 1911. He soon began selling short stories and non-fiction articles to a variety of pulp magazines, such as Argosy, Cavalier, and Adventure. In 1914 Mundy published his first novel, Rung Ho!, soon followed by The Winds of the World and King of the Khyber Rifles, all of which were set in British India and drew upon his own experiences. Critically acclaimed, they were published in both the U.S. and U.K.
Becoming a U.S. citizen, in 1918 he joined the Christian Science new religious movement, and with them moved to Jerusalem to establish the city's first English-language newspaper. Returning to the U.S. in 1920, he began writing the Jimgrim series and saw the first film adaptations of his stories. Spending time at the Theosophical community of Lomaland in San Diego, California, he became a friend of Katherine Tingley and embraced Theosophy. Many of his novels produced in the coming years, most notably Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley and The Devil's Guard, reflected his Theosophical beliefs. He also involved himself in various failed business ventures, including an oil drilling operation in Tijuana, Mexico. During the Great Depression he supplemented his literary income by writing scripts for the radio series Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He suffered from diabetes, eventually dying of complications.
During Mundy's career his work was often compared with that of his more commercially successful contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. Like them he expressed a positive interest in Asian religion and philosophy, although unlike them he adopted an anti-colonialist stance. His work has been cited as an influence on a variety of later science-fiction and fantasy writers, and he has been the subject of two biographies.

Early life

Childhood: 1879–99

Mundy was born as William Lancaster Gribbon on 23 April 1879 at his parental home of 59 Milson Road, Hammersmith in West London. The following month he was baptised into the Anglican Church at the local St. Matthews Church. His father, Walter Galt Gribbon, had been born in Leeds, Yorkshire as the son of a porcelain and glass merchant. Gribbon had studied at Oxford University's St. John's College and then trained as a barrister before relocating to Swansea, where he first worked as a school teacher and then an accountant. After his first wife's death, he married Mundy's mother, Margaret Lancaster, in Nantyglo in July 1878. A member of an English family based in Wales, she was the sister of the politician John Lancaster. After a honeymoon in Ilfracombe, Devon, the newly married couple moved to Hammersmith, where Mundy was their first child. They would have three further children: Walter Harold, Agnes Margaret, and Florence Mary, although the latter died in infancy. In 1883 the family moved to nearby Norbiton, although within a few years had moved out of London to Kingston Hill, Surrey.
Image:Rugby School 850.jpg|300px|right|thumb|Mundy was educated at Rugby School, pictured
Mundy was raised into a conservative middle-class Victorian milieu. His father owned a successful accountancy business and was director of the Woking Water and Gas Company, as well as being an active member of the Conservative Party and Primrose League. He was also a devout Anglican, serving as warden at St. Luke's Church. The family went on summer holidays to southern coastal towns such as Hythe, Sandgate, and Charmouth, with Mundy also spending time visiting relatives in Bardney, Lincolnshire. He attended Grove House, a preparatory school in Guildford, Surrey, before receiving a scholarship to attend Rugby School, where he arrived in September 1893.
In 1895 his father died of a brain hemorrhage, and Mundy henceforth became increasingly rebellious. He left Rugby School without any qualifications in December 1895; in later years he recalled bad memories of the institution, comparing it to "prisons run by sadists". With Mundy unable to go to university, his mother hoped that he might enter the Anglican clergy. He worked briefly for a newspaper in London, although the firm closed shortly after. He left England and moved to Quedlinburg in northern Germany with his pet fox terrier. He didn't speak German but secured work as an assistant driver towing vans for a circus; after a colleague drunkenly killed his dog he left the job. Back in England, he worked in farming and estate management for his uncle in Lincolnshire, describing this lifestyle as "'High Farming,' high church and old port and all that went with that life - pheasant shooting, fox-hunting and so on."

India and East Africa: 1899–1909

Talbot's accounts of the following years are unreliable, tainted by his own fictionalised claims about his activities. In March 1899 he sailed aboard the Caledonia to Bombay in British India, where he had secured an administrative job in a famine relief program based in the native state of Baroda. There he purchased a horse and became a fan of pig-sticking, a form of boar hunting.
After suffering a bout of malaria he returned to Britain in April 1900. In later years he claimed that during this period he had fought for the British Army in the Second Boer War, although this was untrue, for chronologically it conflicted with his documented activities in Britain; he did however have relatives who fought in the conflict. Another of his later claims was that while visiting Brighton in summer 1900 he ran into his favourite writer, Rudyard Kipling, while walking in the street, and that they had a conversation about India.
Securing a job as a reporter for the Daily Mail, in March 1901 he returned to India aboard the Caledonia. His assignment was to report on the Mahsud uprising against the British administration led by Mulla Pawindah. On this assignment, he accompanied British troops although only reached as far as Peshawar, not entering the Khyber Pass which he would use as a setting for later stories. While in Rajputana he had his first experience with an Indian guru, and after his assignment he went tiger hunting. In Bombay in 1901 he met Englishwoman Kathleen Steele, and they had returned to Britain by late 1902, where he gained work for the Walton and Company merchant firm in Holborn. The couple married in Westminster in January 1903. By this point he had amassed large debts, and with his wife fled to Cape Town, South Africa to evade his creditors; in his absence he was declared bankrupt. He wife returned to London, and they never saw each other again. From there, he claimed to have boarded a merchant sailing vessel to Australia, where he spent time in Sydney and Brisbane before sailing back to Africa and disembarking in Laurenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa.
In February 1904 he arrived in Mombasa, British East Africa, later claiming that he initially worked as a hunter. He also claimed that while near Shirati, he was shot in the leg with a poison spear by a Masai who was stealing his cattle. He travelled to Muanza in German East Africa, where he was afflicted with blackwater fever. Mundy then worked as an elephant hunter, collecting and selling ivory. His later novel, The Ivory Trail, was inspired largely by his own experiences at this time. In later years he alleged that he met Frederick Selous at this juncture, although Mundy's biographer has pointed out that Selous was not in East Africa at this time.
Mundy secured employment as the town clerk of Kisumu, a frontier town where he was stationed during a number of indigenous tribal insurgencies against British imperial rule; the Kisii rebelled in the winter of 1904-05, followed by the Sotik and the Nandi in summer 1905. On each occasion the rebels were defeated by the British Army. Christian missionaries pressured Mundy into overseeing a program of providing clothes for the native population, who often went naked; he thought this unnecessary, although designed a goat-skin apron for them to wear. He made the acquaintance of a magico-religious specialist, Oketch, of the Kakamega Kavirondo tribe, who healed him after a hunting accident. He had sexual relationships with a variety of indigenous women, and was dismissed from his job as a result. He informed his wife of these activities, thus suggesting that she sue him for divorce; the divorce was granted in May 1908.
Unemployed, he moved to Nairobi, where he met a married woman, Inez Craven. Together they eloped, and she divorced her husband in November 1908. The couple moved to an island on Lake Victoria, where they lived from February to June, although were subsequently arrested under the Distressed British Subjects Act; under this, they faced imprisoned for six months in Mombasa before deportation to Bombay, although this eventuality did not occur. In November, the couple married at Mombasa Registry Office; here, he first used the name of "Talbot Mundy", erroneously claiming to the son of Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, 20th Earl of Shrewsbury. That month, they left Mombasa aboard the SS Natal, stopping in Djibouti and Port Said on their way to Marseille, from where they made their way to England. There they visited Mundy's mother in Lee-on-Solent, Hampshire, and she agreed to give Mundy a substantial sum of money; it would be the last time Mundy saw her. Mundy and his wife spent most of the money while staying in London, before leaving from Southampton aboard the SS Teutonic in September 1909, headed for the United States.