My father, Tony Keable-Elliott, was the first person Dr Hugh Cecil was keen to talk to, when he began to research the life of Robert Keable for a chapter in his book, The Flower of Battle. There were two reasons for this. First he wanted to find out what Tony knew and, second to ask permission to write about Tony's father. For Hugh Cecil, Tony’s permission was essential and I am sure he would not have continued with his research without it.

I can fully understand the importance for a biographer to have the son of their subject on board, but I am also sure this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand this will allow you to access many private family papers, but on the other hand you enter into the murky world of family myths and remembrances.

I, of course, learnt much about Robert Keable and his life from my father. What I have found hard is to disentangle the family myths from the true story of Robert Keable, and I am sure Hugh Cecil must have had the same problem.

There is an obvious reason why my father was an unreliable witness. He never knew his mother and his father died when he was three.

Tony Keable-Elliott was born on November 14^th, 1924. Tragically his mother, Jolie Keable, did not survive the birth of her only son and died that same day. Robert Keable, distraught and also unwell, decided it would be for the best if Jolie’s good friend Rita Elliott looked after Tony, organising a wet nurse and looking after his care. Robert Keable left England, and his new son, barely six weeks after Tony’s birth and only returned to see him once, around Christmas 1926.  I now have evidence, (which sadly my father never saw) that leaving Tony with the Elliotts was seen by Robert Keable as a temporary arrangement. However, of course when he died in 1927 it became permanent.

It is not surprising that Tony, when he looked back on his life, felt he had been abandoned by his father, and this I believe tainted his view of him. In my book Utterly Immoral I quote from a letter Robert Keable wrote to Tony just weeks after he was born. In it he explained that he planned to pay for the boy’s education but then leave him to fend for himself. Tony explained to Jim Douglas in a letter in 2001 why his understanding of his father was so confused.

His first wife disapproved of much of what he did, looked upon me as a bastard (which in fact I was), and on his death burnt all his books and his papers. My widowed paternal grandmother was fond of me but never understood my father. She and her husband, himself a clergyman, were very low church, strait-laced, and Victorian. They misunderstood much of what my father did and disapproved of even more. To them there was little to choose between the devil and the catholic church and my father was always high church.

… I was initially soured that he left a terminal legacy to Magdalene college thereby preventing me going there (through lack of funds) and bequeathed all his books and papers to his son in Tahiti, thereby leaving me with no tangible links to his life.

For much of his life my father bottled up his views and it was only when Hugh Cecil, Jim Douglas and I began to question him – by which time he was in his sixties – that he started to discuss his parents.

It was actually his mother’s story which Tony was most mistaken about. He wrote to Jim Douglas:

Jolie followed her sister to India living the artificial and probably promiscuous life current in the days of the Raj. Come the war she trained in this country as a driver and mechanic and was one of the first women to be allowed to go to the front in France. There she met my father, and as is customary in time of war, lived for the day.

I have since discovered that Jolie never visited India as a young woman, (she was born there but left aged two) and that she started training as a driver when just 18, while her sister was still at school in Bath. I have also found no evidence that she went to the front during the war, and it is much more likely she remained a long way behind the front line.

In the same letter he told Jim Douglas:

My father was devasted when his black congregation was in fact conscripted as cannon fodder for the western front and insisted on going with them.

The truth was Robert Keable was desperate to go to France and led the recruitment of volunteers, who incidentally never fought and were certainly no cannon fodder.

One ‘fact’ Tony relayed was that his father had a death bed conversion and became a Roman Catholic, although I can find nothing to support this and much circumstantial evidence to suggest it was not true.

Another red herring that I chased was my father’s firm belief that the main character in Numerous Treasure was a portrait of his mother – recast as a 16-year-old Tahitian – and that in some way the character Tony, a girl, was a nod to him. I think he held this view because he believed the book was written after he was born (and Jolie had died), when in fact the novel was written a year before those events.

One of the first questions I am asked, having written my book on Robert Keable, is do I think I would have liked the man? The answer today is a definite yes. All I have now read suggests to me he would have been delightful company, polite, witty, interested and interesting. Sadly, I do not think my father would have given the same answer. He saw Robert Keable as an unhappy man who in the last years of his life was filled with guilt over ‘failing his parents, his failure to rationalise his own religion and his failure to do what he felt he should of done in the war years.’

Tony did say in a letter that it was only late in life that he realised his father’s true worth. But I think he saw that worth as a significant man of his generation. Raging against moral injustice but fighting battles which have largely now been won. So when Hugh Cecil and Tim Couzens asked him if they could write a biography of his father’s life he was hardly encouraging. He wrote in Dec 1996:

It is very kind of you to invite my approval of a short biography of my father which would certainly have my blessing, but superficially it would seem a very difficult task to undertake. He was not, I would have thought, a big enough character to interest a wide public and although his religious beliefs were well ahead of his times and in sympathy with current ideology, their promulgation now would hardly cause a ripple in ecclesiastical circle. Far be it for me to discourage you … but I would have thought it very difficult to marry a racy and unconventional life story to an intrinsically Christian and missionary zeal. … If it came off (it) could be a great success; it might also be a dog’s dinner.

My father did also suggest to me that no one would be interested in a book about Robert Keable. I hope to prove him wrong, and to have written something that isn’t a dog’s dinner.

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If you wish to find out more about Tony Keable-Elliott, who died in 2020, you can find his obituary here: https://oldshirburnian.org.uk/obituaries/keable-elliot-david-anthony-g-72/