Second paragraph of third chapter:
That same year, Helen and Richard [David Whitaker’s parents] moved into a flat in Tulse Hill, south London, on a much more modest scale than they’d been living in Knebworth. Robert [David Whitaker’s brother] said that shortly after this, still in 1930, ‘Richard’s leg caused a great deal of trouble and he went back to Roehampton where the limb was amputated/’ That use of ‘back’ suggests an ongoing problem with repeated visits to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, south-west London. Established in 1915, this ‘quickly became known as one of the world’s leading limb-fitting and amputee rehabilitation centres’. Richard was likely in serious pain and unable to walk let alone work. Physical symptoms may also have been accompanied by mental distress, still barely understood by doctors – let alone wider society. Perhaps this was the cause of Richard and Helen’s earlier separation.
We got a lot fewer books last year to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who than we did for the fiftieth in 2013. But this really makes up for it. David Whitaker was one of the crucial figures in early Doctor Who – script editor at the very beginning of the show, author of the first Doctor Who books, writer of eight Old Who stories; but dead at 51 in 1980, and so missing the extra lease of life given to many former Who creators by the explosion in fan activity later that decade.
Simon Guerrier has done a great job of telling the story of those 51 years in 413 pages. He complains near the beginning that most previous published accounts supposedly (and even actually) by Whitaker about his own life have turned out on investigation to be substantially untrue; details are wrong, achievements exaggerated, essentially the fiction-writer’s skill deployed to his own autobiography.
But Guerrier has mined the archives, talked to relatives (though again, a lot of them died young too), and dug through the assembled Who lore of the past six decades to paint a sober and intriguing picture of a man who knew he wanted to write but didn’t quite know how to do that for a living. He also brings in some vivid social research about Whitaker’s family background and his first marriage, and looks at how the BBC in the 1960s struggled to set up a career structure that adequately rewarded creativity. (I suspect it hasn’t quite got there even today.)
The documentary and memory trail goes a bit thin at the moment when Whitaker and his first wife went to Australia, and he came back a couple of years later with his second wife. It’s also a bit scanty at the very end, when his health broke down (probably from too much smoking) and he was unable to get work. But this is understandable, and doesn’t detract from the attractiveness of the book.
Myself, I was struck on reading it by how little people actually recall about Whitaker. Accounts of meetings and conversations where we know he must have been present just don’t mention him, and the drama doc An Adventure in Space and Time wrote him out of history completely. It reminded me of the protagonist of Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars, who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle. When he went fully freelance at what turned out to be the end of his life, I got the sense that he couldn’t get work because very few people remembered who he was. Awfully sad.
Anyway, this is strongly recommended just as a good read about a creator who had a big success in his mid-thirties and was never quite able to find the magic ingredients again. You can get it here if you are lucky – the first two print runs appear to have sold out.
