Tangye, Derek, 1912-1996

Derek Alan Trevithick Tangye (29 February 1912 – 26 October 1996) was a British author who lived in Cornwall for nearly fifty years. He wrote nineteen books which became known as The Minack Chronicles, about his simple life on a clifftop daffodil farm called Dorminack, affectionately referred to as Minack, at St Buryan in the far west of Cornwall with his wife Jeannie, née Jean Everald Nicol. The couple had given up sophisticated metropolitan lives, he as a newspaper columnist (during the war years he had worked for MI5) and she as a hotel PR executive, to live in isolation in a simple cottage surrounded by their beloved animals, which featured in nearly all his works. He had two older brothers Nigel Tangye who was also an author and Colin Tangye, a Lloyds Underwriter. Their father was Richard Trevithick Gilbertstone Tangye, in turn the son of the engineer Richard Tangye. The first of The Minack Chronicles was A Gull on the Roof published in 1961. This was followed by a new book almost every two years. The Way to Minack, the sixth book in the series details the path they took to be at Minack, while a Cottage on a Cliff gives an account of the author's time with MI5.