E. Walter F. Tomlin

E. W. F. Tomlin (1914–88), writer and administrator. Educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, he joined the British Council and served in Iraq, Turkey and France; also in Japan. Anglo-Catholic in religion, he wrote a study of Simone Weil; a book about R. G. Collingwood; and he edited volumes on Wyndham Lewis, Arnold Toynbee and Dickens. He was President of the Dickens Fellowship, 1987–8, and served on the executive committee of International PEN. His memoir T. S. Eliot: A Friendship appeared in 1988.

TSE was to write to Ashley Sampson, 31 May 1937: ‘A young man as yet unknown to the public, and of whose abilities I have a high opinion, is E. W. F. Tomlin.’ To W. E. Salt, Director of Extra-Mural Studies, Univ. of Bristol, 25 May 1939: ‘I have known him for a number of years, indeed before he even went up to Oxford, and have always regarded him as a young man of very unusual promise … I consider him a young man of quite exceptional abilities, as well as of character and seriousness of purpose.’