Fascinating Lives

Over Christmas, we went to see 'Peter Pan' panto. It was quite good and enjoyed by all. Since then, we had to get out some of the movies of Peter Pan - the Disney animated version and 'Hook'. As they take place in London, I was doing a little reading on James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan (who met the Davis boys in Kensington Gardens who were the role models for the story.) That brings us to the title of this blog entry. Barrie (1860-1937) had quite an interesting literary life. Check out this bit from his Wiki entry. Can you even imagine having friends like this?!

"Barrie traveled in high literary circles, and had many famous friends. With Arthur Conan Doyle he wrote a failed musical. With Robert Louis Stevenson he conducted a long correspondence, but the two never met in person. George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbor, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. Jerome K. Jerome introduced Barrie to his wife; H. G. Wells was a friend of many years. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London. Conan Doyle, Jerome, Wells and other luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton and A. A. Milne also occasionally played cricket with a team founded by Barrie for his friends, the "Allahakbarries". (The name was chosen under the mistaken belief that "Allah akbar" means "God save us" in Arabic; in fact it means "God is great".)"

"Barrie also befriended Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and was one of the seven recipients of letters that Scott wrote in the final hours of his life. He was godfather to Robert's son, Peter.^[2] Another close friend of Barrie's, theater producer Charles Frohman, who was responsible for the debut of Peter Pan in both England and the U.S., died famously, declining a lifeboat seat when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. In doing so, Frohman reportedly paraphrased Peter Pan's famous line from the stage play, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

"On several occasions he met and told stories to the little girls who would become Queen Elizabeth II and her younger sister Princess Margaret."

Check out the Peter Pan statue next time you're in Kensington Gardens. Sounds like a good place for a letterbox!