David Crackanthorpe

David Crackanthorpe was born at Newbiggin in the county of Westmoreland, where his family had lived for some eight hundred years. His antecedents include Richard Crackanthorpe, the 16th-century logician mentioned by Sterne in Tristram Shandy, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and the notorious Daniel E. Sickles, a general in the American Civil War. He studied law at Oxford University and practised as a barrister in London, where he married the Irish actress Helena Hughes, now deceased. He has written a biography of Hubert Crackanthorpe, a young writer of the1890s associated with the Yellow Book. He lives in France where he has worked as a forester, gardener and cultivator of olive trees.