Cecil James Sidney Woolf (1927–2019) was an English author and publisher. He was a nephew of the Woolfs of the

Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strac ...

and lived in

Hammersmith Hammersmith is a district of West London, England, southwest of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. ...

and

Mornington Crescent Mornington Crescent is a terraced street in Camden Town, Camden, London, England. It was built in the 1820s, on a greenfield site just to the north of central London. Many of the houses were subdivided into flats during the Victorian era, an ...

. During the Second World War, he joined the

Royal Tank Regiment The Royal Tank Regiment (RTR) is the oldest tank unit in the world, being formed by the British Army in 1916 during the First World War. Today, it is the armoured regiment of the British Army's 12th Armoured Infantry Brigade. Formerly known as th ...

, fought in Italy and rose to the rank of Captain.

Life

He was the son of Philip Woolf and his wife Barbara Lownds, brought up on the Rothschild

Waddesdon Waddesdon is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, west-north-west of Aylesbury on the A41 road. The village also includes the hamlets of Eythrope and Wormstone, Waddesdon was an agricultural settlement with milling, silk weaving and lace m ...

estate where his father was the manager. He was educated at

Stowe School , motto_translation = I stand firm and I stand first , established = , closed = , type = Public school Independent school, day & boarding , religion = Church of England , president = , head_label = Headmaster ...

, and then enlisted in the

at the age of sixteen, fighting in the Italian campaign and rising to the rank of Captain. Leaving the army in 1947, he worked for Woolf, Christie stockbrokers and then became a bookseller. Woolf was the husband of biographer

Jean Moorcroft Wilson Jean Moorcroft Wilson (born 3 October 1941) is a British academic and writer, best known as a biographer and critic of First World War poets and poetry. A lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London, she has written a two-volume biogra ...

, who was general editor of the "War Poets" series of monographs that he published. He was himself named after his father's brother, Cecil Nathan Sidney Woolf, who wrote poetry and was killed at

Cambrai Cambrai (, ; pcd, Kimbré; nl, Kamerijk), formerly Cambray and historically in English Camerick or Camericke, is a city in the Nord department and in the Hauts-de-France region of France on the Scheldt river, which is known locally as the Esca ...

in the First World War. His father had been wounded by the same shell which killed his namesake. His writings include ''A Bibliography of Norman Douglas'' (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954); ''A Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo'' (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957); ''The Clerk without a Benefice. A study of Fr. Rolfe, Baron Corvo's conversion and vocation'' (with Brocard Sewell; Aylesford: St. Albert's Press, 1964). Woolf died on 10 June 2019, at the age of 92.

References

1927 births 2019 deaths 20th-century English businesspeople English publishers (people) People educated at The Dragon School Royal Tank Regiment officers {{publisher-stub