Although Utterly Immoral is finally published in November 2022 I have been researching the life and times of Robert Keable for a number of years. Back in 2017 I wrote an article for Your Genealogy Today magazine explaining some of the research that I had done. Below is an edited version of the article.

Robert Keable

Robert Keable was a priest and notorious novelist. He was also my grandfather. His bestselling novel Simon Called Peter, written in 1921, was banned in Boston and mentioned in The Great Gatsby. He died in Tahiti in 1927 when my father was only three. His mistress, my grandmother, died giving birth to my father who was then brought up by family friends in England. My father never really talked about his father but when I started to research his life a few years ago, he gave me a small folder.

First steps

It was like opening a treasure trove; with copies of wills, photographs of my grandfather and grandmother in Tahiti, letters and a small scrapbook with copies of obituaries published in the Times and other newspapers. From the obituaries I got a tantalising glimpse of my grandfather’s incredible life.  Born and educated in England, he trained as a priest, travelled to Zanzibar as a missionary, married, became a parish priest in South Africa, was appointed chaplain to the SANLC  during the First World War, left the priesthood, became a teacher in England, wrote his successful book, became a full time writer and moved to Tahiti. His first will told me about his education because, although he left his money in England in trust to his wife for her lifetime and to his son until he reached 21, the remainder was for a scholarship for students from his school (Whitgift) to his university college (Magdalene, Cambridge). And from his second will I discovered I had an uncle as he left all his land and money in Tahiti to a son Henry and his Tahitian wife Ina Salmon. There were a number of photographs taken in Tahiti and a few letters, one written by James Norman Hall announcing my grandfather’s death. And that was all I knew.

My first steps were to try to find, and read, everything my grandfather had written. He was a prolific writer and alongside his seven novels he wrote a number of religious books, a couple of travelogues on Zanzibar and Tahiti, two collections of short stories and a book about life during the First World War. I got a reader’s pass for the British Library and trawling through their catalogues I found articles he had written for the Atlantic, Asia magazine and The Radio Times. Slowly I was beginning to piece together his life when I discovered I was not alone. In the same year my father was contacted by two very different people. Hugh Cecil, a very eminent historian was looking to write a chapter on Robert Keable in his book later published as The Flower of Battle: How Britain Wrote the Great War; and Dr Douglas, a Glaswegian academic, wrote to confess that back in the early 1960s he had started to write a book on Robert Keable. Over the next two years Dr Douglas slowly passed on all the information he had gathered, which included a number of letters from Robert Keable’s contemporaries (at university and theological college) saying what they knew.

Although entertaining, ultimately these letters have proved to be the most unreliable sources of information and as I tried to draw up a timeline of my grandfather’s life I realised that many of the stories and dates (admittedly recalled forty years after the events) are inaccurate or even untrue.

Hugh Cecil and Tim Couzens, a South African biographer with whom he worked, had an advantage over me as they could travel. As a teacher in England with a young family I could not. They found the church in Lesotho where my grandfather preached, and then visited Tahiti where they found my grandfather’s grave and the house he built. They also traced my step-uncle to France and interviewed him.

I began my research just as the internet was taking off and it was American newspaper archives which proved the most informative. I found articles on my grandfather describing his trip to America in January 1925 at the same time as Warner Brothers were making a silent movie of one of his novels – Recompense - and the Klaw Theatre on Broadway was showing a play of his novel, Simon Called Peter. I became fascinated by this since my father was born – and my grandmother had died – barely 6 weeks before my grandfather’s visit. Why did my grandfather leave my dad only six weeks after his birth?

For the next few years I concentrated on researching those ten weeks of my grandfather’s life, finding out all about his trip on the RMSP Orca and his time in New York. A photocopy of the manifest of alien passengers dated 13^th January 1925 confirmed the voyage, as did a cutting from the New York Times which announced Robert Keable’s arrival in New York on the Orca.

More recent research

Since my grandfather had been a priest, the Church Times archives (available through http://www.ukpressonline.co.uk/) were a great source, giving me details of when he and his father were ordained as well as postings, book reviews and even details of some sermons he preached. The UK censuses from 1851 to 1911 (available http://www.ukcensusonline.com/) allowed me to track the life of Robert Keable’s father from a 16-year-old tallow melter in south London to a 56 year old priest. The internet also provided useful background on the First World War. My grandmother was an 18-year-old driver for the Canadian Forestry Corps and my grandfather was chaplain to the South African Native Labour Corps.

My grandfather is mentioned in AC Benson’s diaries as a prolific letter writer. My ‘holy grail’ was to find letters he had written. I drew up a list of everyone famous he might have known. The archives of many literary figures and British companies have been bought up by British and American universities and fortunately they all seem to have excellent online databases, easily found via intelligent Google searches.  I found letters to a theatre impresario, who knew him from school, as well as to his American publishers EP Dutton and GP Putnam, and for a small fee purchased photocopies of letters, book contacts and the like. But the most exciting discovery came when I was looking for the archives of his British publisher and found the letters of Michael Sadler, who I knew was a personal friend of my grandfather. Imagine my elation when I discovered that Temple University in Philadelphia had a collection of over 100 letters written by my grandfather from 1922 to 1927 to Sadler (http://www.worldcat.org/title/constable-correspondence-1921-1939/oclc/727944267). From these letters I have been able to fill in many of the gaps in his life and to learn about his time in Tahiti.

Trip to Tahiti

Finally in 2016 I had the chance to travel to Tahiti and gave myself a week to find out as much as I could. I began at the end and a few hours after I flew in I visited my grandfather’s grave at the Uranie Cemetary in the capital Papeete. The gravestone had not weathered well and it was almost impossible to read the epitaph but I still shed a tear. The following morning I set out to find the location of the first house my grandparents had rented on the island back in 1923. (For more on this see my June 29^th post – Finding the location of Paul Gauguin’s house in Tahiti)

On my last day in the capital I went to both the Hotel de Ville and the national archives (‘Service du Patrimoine Archivistique et Audiovisuel’). I had hoped the French would have insisted on records being kept on all foreign residents on the island but in the end I only managed to get a copy of Robert Keable’s death certificate and his Tahitian son’s birth certificate. Still, after paying for photocopies of the certificates, the helpful lady asked me if my grandfather was famous and I agreed he might have been. So, she took me into her office and found references to him in two grand books Tahitiens: répertoire biographique de la Polynésie française and Bibliographie de Tahiti Et de la Polynésie Française, which she kindly photocopied for me.

Before my trip I had been in touch with Vivienne Millet at the James Norman Hall Mueseum and I went to meet her the next day. James Norman Hall,  who co-wrote The Mutiny of the Bounty with Charles Nordhoff, had been my grandfather’s secretary in the year before he died. I had found no reference to my grandfather in any Hall’s books but I was pleased to see a photograph of Hall on his honeymoon taken at my grandfather’s house (which he had lent them for two weks) and Vivienne recoginsed Hall in one of the photographs I had from the 1920s. Vivienne seemed as intrigued by Robert Keable as me, and over the next few days she introduced me to an American who had lived on Tahiti for over 50 years, Jimmy Nordhoff (Charles Nordhoff’s last remaining child) and Nancy Rutgers Hall (Hall’s daughter) all of whom helped shine a light on my grandfather’s time in Tahiti. Later I also managed to track down the wife of a nephew of Ina Salmon and the daughter of Frank Stimson who had known Robert Keable well. Interviewing these people has given me so much background information on Tahiti in the 1920s.

The highlight of my trip however, was my stay at the house my grandfather had built. Roger and Juliette Gowen had bought the house in the 1960s and looked after it with loving care. I had a description of the house from an interview my grandfather had given the Bedfordshire Times in 1927 as well as passages from his novel Numerous Treasure which had been set in the house. It was amazing to find the house pretty much unchanged with the original imported redwood floor and slate roof. My grandfather had boasted of having a library with three or four thousand books and sure enough in the bookcases were many books with Robert Keable’s bookplate proudly stuck on the first page. I spent two days  at the house finding out about its history. About my grandfather’s tahitian wife Ina who carried on owning the house up until th 1950s and who had been a princess and the niece of the last queen of Tahiti. And about the tupapous or ghost that was supposed to haunt the house and which my grandfather had been seen trying to shoot in the middle of the night with his air rifle.

On the second day I went across the road to meet the son of the man who had sold my grandfather the land. Star Mauu is the same age as my father and he had lived all his life in the house across the road from Robert Keable’s house. He remembered the months after my grandfather died when Ina Salmon used to bring cases of champagne up from Papeete and have wild parties all night. Robert Keable wrote of visiting the Mauu’s house and as I shook Star’s hand I realised I had finally met someone who had met my grandfather in Tahiti - if only as a two year old.