This article was published in the Dorset Echo on 13 September 1978.
Derek Cash meets a highly-praised author who has come to live at Bridport.
INTERNATIONALLY acclaimed author Tom Sharpe took one look at the superb grounds of the former St. Ronan’s School site in St. Andrew’s Road, Bridport, and decided it was the ideal base from which to work on his future novels.
His American wife, Nancy, also fell in love with the grand town house and surroundings at first glance and the couple decided it was the setting they had been seeking to bring up their three young daughters.
Since he met Nancy, Tom and his family had only really lived in and around Cambridge and he was determined to show her English life in a less cosmopolitan area.
Their first efforts to find a suitable new home were more in the direction of Devon — Tom was based at Lympstone for a time during his National Service with the Marines — but after much scanning of estate agents’ files and advertisements they gave up.
Nature
“It was not until we came to stay with my sister at Shipton Gorge that we came across the old school with its lounges and tranquil grounds,” he said.
“We both knew instantly it was exactly the place we wanted to live in — surrounded by the beauty of a rural area but based within a stone’s throw of a reasonably thriving community.”
Tom added that one of his main reasons for wanting to leave the Cambridge area, where he had lectured in history at the College of Arts and Technology from 1963 to 1972, was a sudden fanaticism for gardening — which again the new St. Andrew’s Road home more than caters for.
He works solidly most mornings in one of the old school huts, amid the splendid shrubbery of the huge garden, where there is nothing to disturb his thoughts except nature itself.
Born in 1928, Tom Sharpe was educated at Lancing College before going on to Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He did his National Service and then travelled to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work for the Non-European Affairs Department before teaching in Natal.
By that time he was already actively engaged in writing, mainly plays, and it was partly the success gained from one of these, based on the exploits of an Africaner on stage in London, which led to Tom’s unpopularity with the South African regime and eventually his deportation in 1961.
That was after spending four years as a freelance photographer in Pietermaritzburg, where his occasional assignments with the neighbouring Natal Mercury newspaper provided him with his real insight into the workings of the state.
Antics
Experiences he gleaned, particularly on the workings of the state police, produced ammunition for his first two novels, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure.
But Tom tackled the writing of such a serious topic, back in 1969, as he has done with every successive novel, with the sole aim of making people laugh.
Pure fantasy is his own description of the antics of his many outrageously humorous characters, who still manage to portray, however, some of the various types of people on which such countries as South Africa manage to thrive.
“I am basically a non-political animal but when you witness the way some human beings treat others for a pastime it is impossible to walk around without gaining an increasing guilt complex,” he said.
Once Tom had made that first difficult entrance into the literary world with seemingly consummate ease, there was no turning back, and he now aims to complete at novel a year on average, usually beginning each September.
His popularity as an author, it seems, is something that has snowballed with each successive book — his latest effort, Wilt, has 40,000 copies in paperback in May alone.
Tom found that transferring the setting and indeed the content of his novels from South Africa to the more subdued English way of life, was probably his toughest challenge.
But judging by the success of successive novels such as Porterhouse Blue, Blott on the Landscape and Wilt, his conversion was made without adverse affect on the dark and delightfully witty humour his writings possess.
The subjects of those latter efforts vary from life at a Cambridge college, opposition to the building of a motor way and the intricacies of circumstantial evidence to a satire on the state of English literature in his Anglo-American work, The Great Pursuit.
For Tom feels there is far too much unnecessary philosophy and Freudian analysis used when this subject is discussed or studied in detail these days.
Style
“Some people get upset by the frankness of the incidents and language used in my books,” he said.
“But I can never be accused, I hope, of being crude or basic than for any other reason than to make readers laugh — at either my characters or themselves.”
Despite 30 years of writing, on and off, Tom often finds he still cannot wait to return to his typewriter. “I fortunately never have the problem of drying up,” he said.
“If anything, it is a case of not being able to stop writing.”
But that does not mean the words and style of his latest novel always flow on to the paper without problems.
“It is not unusual to write and rewrite a chapter up to 25 times,” he admitted.
With their three daughters, Melanie, Grace and Jemima, now happily settled at Bridport schools, Tom and Nancy are concentrating on adapting their lives to the seasonal ways of Dorset.
Not that the Sharpes are completely new to the county.
Tom’s grandfather was, before setting out from Weymouth at the turn of the century to sail to Australia and then South Africa, a carpenter at Stalbridge, near Sturminster Newton, and his parents used to recall trips to West Dorset for their holidays.
With his grandfather having gone on to establish the first notable building company in Johannesburg after leaving Dorset, it would appear that Tom Sharpe has followed in his footsteps in reverse.
With the problems of Africa now confined in his life to the odd news item, he smiled wryly as he settled down to work on another chapter in his new Wessex paradise.
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe at work at his typewriter at his new home in Bridport (EBP).