Alas, too much, too soon, proved a curse as well as a blessing and Denys never bettered that early success. Inevitably, much of the material is familiar, but it's a good story and so none the worse for that.Ĭharm was Denys's greatest asset, a capacity for beguiling his peers that saw him elected president of Pop, the Eton term for prefects, in his last year at school. Sara Wheeler gets around this difficulty by making reference in the sub-title of her book to Finch Hatton's times, a stratagem that enables her to take his story from the lazy certainties of Edwardian England, where Denys grew up the younger son of the Earl of Winchilsea, through Eton and Oxford to the early days in Kenya, where he tried his hand at a variety of enterprises before ending up as a white hunter. It's not clear what he ever did to merit a biography of his own. He certainly glittered in his none-too-bright social circle, but he made little impact on the wider world and was always selfish, putting his interests before anyone else's. Karen compared him to d'Artagnan and Beryl thought him like Voltaire. In truth, though, both women tended to romanticise Denys, investing him with heroic qualities that were not always apparent in real life. In her autobiography, West With the Night, she, too, wrote warmly of Denys, remembering him as a man of great charm and intellect, a view that seems to have been almost universal among people who knew him. Beryl later became the first person to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west, a remarkable feat against the prevailing headwinds. Denys was also the lover of Beryl Markham, another Kenya pioneer and former mistress of the Duke of Gloucester.
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