Background

William Mcfee was born on June 15, 1881, in London, England. He was the son of John Henry and Hilda (Wallace) Mcfee.

McFee’s father, John Henry McFee, and his grandfather were sea captains. Not only did John Henry McFee own his ship, but he had also designed and built it. The McFee's settled in New Southgate, a North London suburb, shortly after McFee’s birth.

Education

In 1936, McFee was educated at Culford School, Culford, Suffolk, England. He received an Honorary Master of Arts at Yale.

Career

Following his training, McFee worked for a water plumbing station at Tring and then a Yorkshire engineering firm based in London. While working, McFee found time to read at the British Museum reading room, attend evening classes at the Northampton Institute, meet the artists and writers of Chelsea, and become engaged in socialism and Rudyard Kipling. In 1905 McFee’s uncle encouraged the twenty-four-year-old McFee to leave his desk job for the sea. McFee became a junior engineer on the Rotherfield, traveling around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean. This experience informed his first book, Letters from an Ocean Tramp (1908).

While still working on Ocean Tramp, McFee passed the Board of Trade engineer examination. He departed for Savannah, Georgia, as a third engineer on the Burrsfield in 1907. He also began his novel, Casuals of the Sea. This novel took him five years to complete, and even longer to find a publisher, but it is his best-known novel. McFee wrote his novel, Aliens (1914), between 1912 and 1913, while on leave from sailing. He re-worked Aliens during wartime duty in the Mediterranean for a 1918 edition which received better critical attention.

In 1914 McFee left his work with the United Fruit Company to aid England during World War I. He served first as an engineering officer on British transports in the Mediterranean and then as a sub-lieutenant in the British navy. His experience in the Mediterranean became material for his writing, not only for the articles he wrote for the London magazine Land and Water but for subsequent novels. During this time McFee also wrote nonfiction pieces, some of which appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly and later appeared in his book, A Six-Hour Shift (1920). McFee collected some other periodical pieces in the book Harbours of Memory (1921) and wrote the short story A Port Said Miscellany (1918). Following his service in the war, McFee returned to the United Fruit Company and soon became chief engineer. But he left in 1924 to dedicate himself completely to writing.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, McFee kept busy, contributing in some way to nearly every book having to do with the sea. He also had the opportunity to revisit his Chelsea day in the bohemian literary scene of Greenwich Village.

Achievements

• McFee is known as chief engineer in ships of the Woodfield SS Co., and prolific writer. He was listed as a notable author by Marquis Malformed.

Works

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• book

  • Sailors of Fortune

    (The romance of ships and sailors in the Caribbean and the...)

    1929
  • Letters from an Ocean Tramp 1908
  • Aliens 1914
  • Casuals of the Sea: The Voyage of a Soul 1916
  • A Port Said Miscellany 1918
  • Captain Macedoine's Daughter 1920
  • A six-hour shift 1920
  • Harbours Of Memory 1921
  • An Engineer's Note Book: Essays on Life and Letters 1921
  • Command 1922
  • Race 1924
  • Swallowing the Anchor 1925
  • Sunlight in New Grenada 1925
  • The life of Sir Martin Frobisher 1928
  • Pilgrims of Adversity 1928
  • North of Suez 1930
  • Born To Be Hanged. 1930
  • The Harbourmaster 1932
  • No castle in Spain 1933
  • The Reflections of Marsyas 1933
  • More harbours of memory 1934
  • Beachcomber 1935
  • Sailor's wisdom 1935
  • Sailor's bane 1936
  • Derelicts: A novel 1938
  • Watch Below 1940
  • Spenlove in Arcady. 1941
  • Ship to shore 1944
  • In the first watch 1946
  • Family trouble 1949
  • The law of the sea 1950

Views

McFee developed complex characters and relationships in his novels, stories, and essays to better understand the human condition.

Membership

McFee was a member of the Institution Mechanics Engineers.

Personality

McFee became a United States citizen in 1925. He made his life’s work the sea. Both as a ship engineer and as a writer of tales on the sea, he was an adventurer, a romantic and a philosopher, and his passion for the sea was not the ends but the means for a larger interest - human nature. McFee's hobby was making ship models.

Quotes from others about the person

• “McFee had finally been recognized for his own distinctive gifts, which can be summarized as an ability to create in brief strokes memorable minor characters, an unwavering ironic detachment coupled with an underlying sympathy, and a deep philosophical understanding of the vagaries of circumstances and character.” - Paul Love

Interests

• Ship models

Connections

While in the navy, McFee met Pauline Khondoff, a Bulgarian refugee. The couple wed in 1920, but divorced in 1932. He was married twice more, first to Beatrice Allender who died in 1952 and then to Dorothy North.

Father:

John Henry McFee

Mother:

Hilda (Wallace) M.

Wife:

Beatrice Allender

ex-wife:

Pauline Khondoff

Wife:

Dorothy North

Friend:

Arthur Elder

References

• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 153: Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.
  1995