http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/arts/artsspecial/raleigh-trevelyan-chronicler-of-a-notable-family-dies-at-91.html 2014-11-23 06:53:06 Raleigh Trevelyan, Chronicler of a Notable Family, Dies at 91 Mr. Trevelyan’s books included a biography of Walter Raleigh and a look at the experiences of his many relatives in British India. === Raleigh Trevelyan traced his family across five centuries of British history, a rich delta of ancestor-achievers that included Sir Walter Raleigh, the 16th-century explorer; Thomas Babington Macaulay, an influential 19th-century politician; and a parade of historians, colonial governors, military men and martyrs of various rebellions across the empire. There were personal advantages to being so well connected, as Mr. Trevelyan, a memoirist, journalist and popular historian, often acknowledged in his writing. His career owed many debts to his connections, including the renowned historian (and cousin) But as a writer, Mr. Trevelyan (pronounced trev-ALE-ee-an), who died on Oct. 23 in London at 91, was best known for sharing the privileges of his inheritance with a vast reading public. He mined diaries and correspondence from his famous forebears, and he employed his own deep sympathies as an heir to their reputations in producing acclaimed British histories and biographies. His best-known work, “The Golden Oriole,” a 1987 work that was equal parts memoir, genealogy and historical chronicle, traced the author’s ancestors across 150 years of British rule in India, from the 10 relatives among the hundreds of Britons massacred at Cawnpore in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to his own parents, a British Army officer and his wife, stationed in the early 20th century in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, where Mr. Trevelyan was born and lived for his first eight years. Mr. Trevelyan’s critics sometimes accused him of being reverential toward figures like Walter Raleigh, a legendary plunderer who took part in massacres during the Irish rebellions, or sentimental in recalling the ponies and nursemaids of his childhood in India while glossing over brutalities perpetrated against the Indians next door. His many more admirers, however, celebrated Mr. Trevelyan for lending immediacy and comprehensibility to the times in which his ancestors lived. In “Sir Walter Raleigh,” he waded deep into the nuances of British, French and Spanish foreign policy to explain Raleigh’s various acts of naval heroism and piracy; verified his claims (largely dismissed at the time as wild fabrications) about silver and gold deposits in Guyana; and brought Elizabethan court intrigues into focus to trace the events that led to Raleigh’s years in the Tower of London and his execution in 1618. Reviewing “The Golden Oriole” in The New York Times Book Review In the book, Mr. Trevelyan said that achieving that effect sometimes made him feel as if he were “already dead, a kind of ghost, or anxious uvula-figure bobbing in the clouds.” Walter Raleigh Trevelyan was born in Port Blair, the largest town in the Andaman Islands, on July 6, 1923, to Walter Raleigh Fetherstonhaugh Trevelyan, a colonel in the British Indian Army, and Olive Beatrice Frost Trevelyan. He was sent to boarding school in England when he was 8 and, he wrote, rarely saw his parents in the years after. After graduating from Winchester College in 1942, he served in After the war he worked briefly in banking, then became an editor and executive for a number of London publishing houses, editing both fiction and nonfiction while writing his own books. He wrote about a dozen in all, and edited or translated a dozen or so more. Among his early popular books were several about Italy, including “Princes Under the Volcano” (1973), an account of the British role in Sicily in the 19th and 20th centuries; and “The Shadow of Vesuvius” (1976), about the discovery of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century. A 1978 book, “A Pre-Raphaelite Circle,” viewed the major painters of the early Victorian avant-garde movement of the title through the prism of correspondence he found in the papers of Pauline Trevelyan, a distant relation by marriage who was a confidante and patron of the art critic and artist John Ruskin. Mr. Trevelyan’s death was confirmed by his agent, Bill Hamilton, through a spokesman, who said Mr. Trevelyan had never married. Information about survivors was not available. Mr. Trevelyan’s accounts of his forebears’ role in British history covered well-known historic episodes as well as obscure ones that were telling about imperial rule. He recounted, for example, a 400-mile journey across the south of India by Roughly translated, Mr. Trevelyan wrote, the bearers sang, “There is a fat hog, a great fat hog/How heavy he is, hum-hum/Shake him, shake him well.”