Fred Urquhart (writer)
Fred Urquhart was a Scottish short story writer.
Frederick Burrows Urquhart was born in Edinburgh. His father was chauffeur to the Earl of Breadalbane at Taymouth Castle. He spent much of his childhood in Fife, Perthshire and Wigtownshire. He attended
Stranraer High School and Broughton Secondary School.
On leaving school at 15 he worked in a bookshop. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector and worked on the land during the Second World War, first at Laurencekirk in the Mearns and later at Woburn Abbey. Here he met George Orwell and the Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.
From 1947 he worked as a reader for a London literary agency, and from 1951 to 1954 he read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. From 1951 to 1974 he was a reader for Cassell, and from 1967 to 1971 for J. M. Dent. He also edited a number of books.
Many of his stories revolved around rural life, set in the town of Auchencairn. Amongst his work the best regarded is Jezebel's Dust. One obituarist said that, "His skill was to show characters in everyday, conversational action" and, writing in the Manchester Evening News in November 1944, George Orwell praised his "remarkable gift for constructing neat stories with convincing dialogue."
Many of his stories were read on the radio, and Palace of Green Days was a Book at Bedtime in 1985.
He had a particular love of horses and edited The Book of Horses.
Urquhart was homosexual. He moved to Ashdown Forest in East Sussex in 1958 with his companion, the dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, but when Wyndham Allen died in 1990 Urquhart moved back to Scotland. He was a friend of Rhys Davies, with whom he shared a cottage in Tring in 1946, and of Norah Hoult.
Urquhart died in Musselburgh at the age of 83.Selected bibliography
