Newby was born in Barnes, London,[3] and grew up near Hammersmith Bridge, London. His father, George, was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers, and his mother, (Minnie) Hilda (née Pomeroy) had been a dress model at Harrods.[4] Newby was educated at St Paul's School;[5] after leaving school he worked for two years at the Dorland advertising agency until 1938 when, at the age of 18,[1] he apprenticed aboard the Finnish windjammerMoshulu and took part in the "grain race" from Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. This voyage was subsequently described in The Last Grain Race and pictorially documented in Learning the Ropes.[6]
Military career
During the Second World War, Newby was commissioned in the Black Watch[7] in 1940. As a junior officer in the Rajput Regiment of the British Indian Army, he studied for six months of 1941 in Fatehgarh, India, for the Lower Standard Urdu Examination that was required to command Indian troops abroad.[8] After passing the examination he was posted to North Africa.[1]
He served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section, and was captured during an operation against the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1946[9] for his part in the raid.[1]
Newby was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, PG21, at Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later to PG49 at Fontanellato, near Parma. Escaping with Michael Gilbert[10] and other British prisoners after the Italian Armistice, he was helped to hide in the Apennine countryside by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Vanda Škof (later Wanda Skof),[11] who married him after the war and became a companion on his travels. These experiences were described in his memoir Love and War in the Apennines, which focuses on how he was helped by ordinary Italians. A film, In Love and War, was made in 2001 based on the book, starring Callum Blue as Newby and Barbora Bobuľová as Wanda. He was free until January 1944, when he was recaptured.[1]
Postwar career
After the war, he spent 17 years working on and off in the women's fashion business, described in the book Something Wholesale (1962). In 1956, he set out to climb Mir Samir in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan with his friend Hugh Carless,[1] an expedition later chronicled in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The voyage included a chance meeting with the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger.[12] From 1964 to 1973, Newby was Travel Editor for The Observer newspaper.[13]
Later life and recognition
In 1967, Newby and his wife began restoring a dilapidated farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps in Italy.[14]A Small Place in Italy, a memoir of the couple's experiences in renovating the house, was published in 1995.
Cocker, Mark, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century, London: Secker and Warburg, and New York: Pantheon, 1992
Newby, Wanda, Peace and War: Growing up in Fascist Italy, London: Collins, 1991
Robb, Kenneth A. and Harender Vasudeva, "Eric Newby" in British Travel Writers, 1940[-]1997, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 204, edited by Barbara Brothers and Julia M. Gergits, Detroit: Gale, 1999: 223–34
Thesiger, Wilfred, Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad, London: Collins, 1979; as The Last Nomad, New York: Dutton, 1980
