British poet and dramatist James Elroy Flecker was born Herman Elroy
Flecker in London, England, in 1884. His father, Rev. W.H. Flecker, was
appointed headmaster of the Dean Close School in Cheltenham, England.
The family lived on campus, and young Herman spent most of his youth
there. He came to writing poetry at an early age (13), and at age 16 he
was sent to Uppingham and from there to Trinity College, Oxford (where
he changed his first name from Herman to James), which he attended from
1902 to 1906.
At Oxford he achieved average grades, but that was due mainly to his
obsession with French poetry, to which he devoted much of the time he
should have spent studying the school's classical curriculum. It was
also at Oxford that, despite the strict evangelical Protestant
upbringing by his father, he rejected Christianity and became an
agnostic.
Upon graduation from Oxford he secured a job teaching at a private
school in Hempstead at the end of 1906. He had decided that he wanted
to become an interpreter in the consular service, so he set about
learning as many languages as he could. He already spoke French and
German, and to those he added Italian, Spanish and modern Greek. In
1908 he passed the consular service examination, and then began a
two-year course in modern languages at Cambridge.
In June of 1910 he was posted by the consular service to
Constantinople, Turkey, but shortly afterwards he was discovered to
have tuberculosis and was returned to England to recover at a
sanitarium in the Cotswolds, where he stayed for three months. He had
already published two books of verse, "The Bridge of Fire" and
"Thirty-Six Poems", and it was at the sanitarium that he wrote the play
"Don Juan". When he left the sanitarium he traveled to London and
Paris, then back to Constantinople and from there to Beirut, Lebanon,
where he was vice-consul and where he married a Greek woman, Helle
Skiadaressi. In May of 1913 he began to have major health
problems--tuberculosis again--and was taken to a sanitarium in
Switzerland. He spent the last few years of his life in a variety of
sanitariums in that country. It was during that period that he
re-converted to Christianity.
James Elroy Flecker died in Davos, Switzerland, on January 3, 1915.
