Hugh Walters
Hugh Walters, born Walter Llewellyn Hughes on June 5, 1910, in Bilston, Staffordshire, England, was an influential British author known for his children's science fiction novels. Initially involved in his family's furniture business, Walters also served his community as a local councillor and justice of the peace. He adopted the pseudonym Hugh Walters for his literary work, which celebrated the emerging space age through the adventures of his young protagonist, Chris Godfrey. His first book, *Blast-off at Woomera*, was published in 1957, marking the beginning of a series aimed at engaging readers aged nine to eleven. Although his narratives often lagged behind contemporary advancements in space exploration, Walters maintained a remarkable publishing frequency, producing one novel a year until 1981. Despite a decline in narrative energy and originality in his later works, he continued to capture the imagination of young readers. Walters's writing reflects a nostalgic connection to his own childhood interests and experiences. He passed away from heart disease on January 13, 1993.
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Hugh Walters
Writer
- Born: June 5, 1910
- Birthplace: Bilston, Staffordshire, England
- Died: January 13, 1993
- Place of death: Wolverhampton, England
Biography
Walter Llewellyn Hughes, who wrote under the pseudonym Hugh Walters, was born in Bilston, Staffordshire, England, on June 5, 1910, the son of a man who ran a furniture shop. He attended Bilston Central School and Dudley Grammar School before going into the family business. His business career flourished and he became chairman of Walter Hughes Ltd., the family furnishing company, and managing director of Bransteds Ltd., an engineering firm that made brass bedsteads. He was a pillar of the Bilston community, serving as a local councillor and, from 1947 until his retirement in 1974, as justice of the peace. His first marriage in 1993 to Doris Higgins produced a son and a daughter; Doris died in 1965 and he married Susan Hughes in 1977.
The name Hugh Walters was invented as a jeu d’esprit, his early works being a celebration of the myth of the coming space age set in a distinctively British mold. This type of writing was pioneered by such stalwarts of the British Interplanetary Society as authors Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Temple, and Patrick Moore, all of whom wrote entertainments for children. Walters’s works were aimed at a younger age group than the teenage-orientated novels of Clarke, W. E. Johns, and “E. C. Eliott” (Reginald Martin), taking on the more difficult task of attempting to engage readers between the ages of nine and eleven.
The adventures of Walters’s young hero, Chris Godfrey, were recounted in his first book, Blast-off at Woomera, published in 1957. The book arrived rather late on the scene, after Clarke and the other writers had already laid much of the groundwork for the space age subgenre of science fiction. Godfrey’s exploits seemed derivative and a little behind the times. It took him three volumes to reach the moon; by the time here arrived there in Operation Columbus, published in 1960, the American and Soviet space programs were making rapid progress and the actual moon landing was only nine years away. However, Godfrey’s adventures accelerated rapidly thereafter; he reached Jupiter in Journey to Jupiter, published in 1965, and Saturn in Spaceship to Saturn, published in 1967.
Walters made up for his belated start and relatively slow pace with an astonishing market longevity, even though his books lost much of their narrative energy when their plots were forced to retreat to the narrower horizons of Earth or to retread old ground. He continued to produce further adventures long after his rivals in the field had packed up and departed, producing a novel a year until 1981, when age finally caught up with him. (P-K: Psychokinesis, published in 1986, was probably written much earlier.) The effects of age took their toll on the books, too, which became increasingly cranky as well as repetitive and showed a dwindling enthusiasm for the details of space hardware.
When Godfrey eventually grew up and became the adult director of the United Nations Exploration Agency, Hughes substituted Tony Hale as his juvenile protagonist. However, Walters seemed less comfortable handling Hale, a supposed middle-class lad, than he had in managing Godfrey, the public schoolboy. This may seem odd, given that Hughes himself was a middle-class boy made good, but it emphasizes the extent to which his writing was a nostalgic product of his own boyhood reading. Hughes died of heart disease on January 13, 1993.