James Hilton

James Hilton (1900-1954), English author, famous for the novels Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr Chips.

He was born in Leigh, Lancashire, where both of his parents were teachers. In his first year the family relocated to Walthamstow, east London, where his father became headmaster of Chapel End School. Hilton attended The Leys School, Cambridge, and then advanced to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was a brilliant student.

After graduating in 1921 he lived at Oak Hill Gardens, Woodford Green, with his parents, and supported himself by working as a journalist throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, while also pursuing his ambition to be a novelist. His debut novel Catherine Herself had been published in 1920, while he was still at Cambridge, and he followed it with And Now Goodbye (1931). Lost Horizon, published in 1933, brought him his first major success. The book tells of a group of foreign travellers whose plane crashes in an undiscovered Himalayan paradise. The name of the idyll, Shangri-La, has subsequently made its way into the lexicon, meaning an imaginary utopia. The novel won the respected Hawthornden Prize.

Hilton enjoyed even greater success in 1934, when his short novel Goodbye, Mr Chips was published. He had originally written the story, in only four days, for inclusion in the 1933 Christmas issue of British Weekly magazine. It relates the 60-year career of a devoted schoolmaster, Mr Chipping, who with decency and humanity teaches generations of boys at a fictional public school, Brookfield. The character of Mr Chipping was a composite of Hilton’s father, John, and two of the teachers at the schools he attended: Mr Topliss, who took Latin, English, and History at the Walthamstow Sir George Monoux Grammar School and William Balgarnie, whom Hilton remembered from his days at The Leys School.

The success of Hilton’s first two novels led to him being courted by Hollywood, and in 1935 he crossed the Atlantic to work as a screenwriter. There he wrote many scripts, including the film adaptation of Mrs Miniver (1942) for which he won an Academy Award, until his premature death from liver cancer. Many of his novels were made into films, including Lost Horizon (1937, directed by Frank Capra), two versions of Goodbye, Mr Chips, starring Robert Donat (1939) and Peter O’Toole (1969), and Random Harvest (book 1941; film 1942, with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson).