My friend Geoffrey Elborn, who has died aged 72, was a biographer whose lives of the writers Edith Sitwell and Francis Stuart attracted wide praise for their scholarship and readability.
Geoffrey was born in Edinburgh and as a baby was adopted, with his twin sister, Gillian, by Arthur Elborn, an architect, and his wife, Janet (nee Milne), a schoolteacher. When Geoffrey was seven the family relocated to the tiny former port of Airth, near Falkirk, where as a teenager he got in touch with the wider world by writing to musicians, artists and politicians, some of whom became friends. In his late teens, on his first trip to London, he visited the artist Laura Knight, took tea with Clement Attlee and, through Mary Wilson, was treated to a tour of 10 Downing Street.
After leaving Larbert high school in Falkirk in 1968, Geoffrey was briefly a cub reporter at the Falkirk Herald, and then took a job as a library assistant in Edinburgh.
At the age of 26 he left librarianship to take up a place at the University of Leeds, where he study English and music. His first book, Edith Sitwell: A Biography, appeared in 1981, two years after he graduated. His next was a life of Princess Alexandra (1982), which he did not want to do but was obliged to carry out as part of his book deal; nonetheless it brought him some of his most wide-ranging fans.
I first met Geoffrey in 1982, due to our shared admiration for the painter John Piper, about whom he was compiling a festschrift, To John Piper on His Eightieth Birthday: Essays Presented By His Friends (1983). Over the 40 years of mainly pub conversations that followed Geoffrey provided a stream of often hilarious literary anecdotes, sometimes accompanied by expert mimicry.
Although a committed socialist from his late teens, Geoffrey’s next biography was a sympathetic life (the first) of the controversial Irish novelist and IRA gun-runner Stuart, who, in his broadcasts on German radio during the second world war, had professed an admiration for Adolf Hitler.
His next and last book, The Dedalus History of Vodka (2013), was a new departure, but its focus on the social history of the spirit reflected his passion for Russia. At his death he was researching a work on Russian–Scottish relations over the centuries.
Despite earning money through writing, Geoffrey had to support himself through other work, including as a manager of Read’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, in the early to the mid-80s and at Vermilion Books in Red Lion Street in the 90s.
He once also taught music at the City of London school for girls (1980-82), a job he was recommended for by his friend Malcolm Williamson, master of the Queen’s music. During the last year of Geoffrey’s life he devoted most of his time to completing the huge task of archiving Williamson’s private papers.
He is survived by his partner, the museum educator Mark Watson.
