On This Day 8th January 1897 the writer Dennis Wheatley was born. The family lived at a number of locations in Streatham
Dennis Yeats Wheatley (8 January 1897 – 10 November 1977) was an English writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s. His Gregory Sallust series was one of the main inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond stories.
He was born in Brixton, the elder child and only son of Albert David Wheatley (d. 1927), wine merchant, and his wife, Florence Elizabeth Harriet (b. 1874). After an unhappy year at Dulwich College he became a cadet in HMS Worcester. At seventeen, after a year learning something of the wine trade in Germany, he worked in his father's shop in the West End of London.
The family lived at "Wootton Lodge" 1904-1910 and with his father's unlucky speculations on the Stock Exchange, he had to sell Wootton Lodge and move into a much smaller home at 1 Becmead Avenue where they lived 1910-13 and then Clinton House, 1 Palace Road.
Image of Dennis Wheatley ©National Portrait Gallery
