Philip Marie Constant Bancroft O'Connor (8 September 1916 – 29 May 1998) was a British writer andsurrealist poet, who also painted. He was one of the 'Wheatsheaf writers' of 1930sFitzrovia (who took their name from a pub).
In hisMemoirs of a Public Baby (1958,Faber and Faber) O'Connor wrote about his early life, which was "shrouded in a good deal of mystery and make-believe".[1] According to O'Connor, his father, Bernard, was an Oxford-educated surgeon of sophisticated tastes, descended from the last High King of Ireland; he allegedly died early in the First World War whilst serving in the Navy. Notwithstanding O'Connor's account, "neither the Admiralty, Oxford University nor the various doctors' registers are able to authenticate" what he wrote. Per O'Connor's account, his mother considered his father "riff-raff" and "a cad". O'Connor gave her name as Winifred Xavier Rodyke-Thompson, of an Irish Roman Catholic family; she claimed her grandfather had been born into the Spring Rice family headed byBaron Monteagle of Brandon, later changing his name. During O'Connor's childhood, his mother founded the Somerset Cigarette Agency and secured a government contract to produce inferior cigarettes for supply to soldiers.[2] In 1934 he was a close friend in London with the authorLaurie Lee, who mentions him in his bookAs I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, chapter 2, pages 6-7.
Memoirs of a Public Baby was followed byThe Lower View (1960),Living in Croesor (1962) andVagrancy (1963). He was a heavy drinker and (at the very least) massively eccentric, living a mainly parasitic life. In his own words, he "bathed in life and dried [himself] on the typewriter".
In 1963, O'Connor interviewed an acquaintance,Quentin Crisp, for theBBC Third Programme. A publisher who happened to hear the broadcast was impressed by Crisp's performance, and as an indirect result of O'Connor's interview, Crisp ended up writingThe Naked Civil Servant.[3]
He fathered "an unknown number of attractive and intelligent children", including Philip, Max, Sarah, Peter, John, Allaye, Patric, Rachel, Maxim and Félix, referenced in his obituary inThe New York Times.[4][5][6][7] His first wife, married in 1941, was lawyer's daughter Jean Mary Hore, who was sent to a mental hospital after an attempt on her husband's life; she lived until 1997, having been confined for over fifty years. Jean was also the unrequited love ofPaul Potts, who wrote about her inDante Called You Beatrice (1960).[8] In 1963 O'Connor married secondly (Anne) Nicolle Gaillard-d'Andel;[9]Memoirs of a Public Baby is dedicated toAnna Wing, the actress and his third partner with whom he had a son, Jon, an education consultant[10] and former teacher.[11] O'Connor met the American heiressPanna Grady in 1967 and later settled with her in the Gard, in France, until his death in 1998. They never married.[7] Two sons, Maxim and Félix, were born from their union.
