Lewis Evelyn Gielgud, MBE (11 June 1894 – 25 February 1953, Paris) was a British scholar, writer, intelligence officer and humanitarian worker.
Life[]
Lewis was the eldest son of Kate Terry-Lewis and Frank Gielgud, and an elder brother to the broadcaster Val Gielgud and the actor John Gielgud. He attended Eton College as a King's Scholar and then studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner in 1912 and a classical demy in 1913. On the outbreak of the First World War he became an officer in the 6th Battalion, The King's Shropshire Light Infantry, but left active service after being wounded in 1915. He spent the rest of the war with the War Office (1916–17) and British Military Mission in Paris (1917–19). After the war he joined the staff of the International League of Red Cross Societies, rising to Under-Secretary General in 1927 and marrying Zita Gordon in 1937 (they had only one child, a daughter Maina Gielgud). He travelled far and wide for the organisation, organising international Red Cross conferences and giving lectures and broadcasts for them, but resigned from the organisation on the outbreak of the Second World War. He was given another army commission in 1940, serving in the War Office again and then being transferred to the Intelligence Corps (being promoted to his final rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the latter in 1942). Released from the army in 1944, he returned to the Red Cross in 1945 as their sub-commissioner in Paris. He was Co-Ordinating Officer of the Inter Allied Reparation Agency in Brussels from 1946 to 1949, a counsellor of OEEC from 1949 to 1951, and a senior official with UNESCO from 1951 until his death shortly after an operation in Paris in 1953. He and Zita divorced in 1951.
Works[]
- Red Scroll, a novel
- The Wise Child, a novel
- A book on travel
- Several translations and radio plays
- Three plays written with Naomi Mitchison (Lewis was close friends with her and her brother J. B. S. Haldane)
- The Vigil of Venus (1952) [1]
External links[]
- http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/oxpoetry/index/ig.html
- DNB entry on John Gielgud, with information on Lewis
- Obituary of Lewis Gielgud, The Times, Thursday, 26 February 1953; page 10
The original article can be found at Lewis Gielgud and the edit history here.