MABEL FENTON GRICE and HERBERT PAUL GRICE --. PETER THOMAS GEACH and ELEONORE FREDERYKA ADOLPHINA SGONINA

Speranza

With gratitude to Mr. Anderson.

Geach's mother was E. F. A. Geach, born in Essen, Germany on 24 May 1896, died in Cardiff, on 10 August 1951.

Eleonora Frederika Adolphina Sgonina (her forenames were sometimes spelled as "Eleonore", "Frederyka", and "Adolfina") was the oldest of four children of Adolf (sometimes "Adolph") Sgonina (1870-1954) and his wife Eleonore (1874-1949), both German-Polish, who were married in 1895. 

Geach's mother had three younger brothers. 

Geach's maternal grandfather was a civil engineer.

Just before the turn of the century the family settled in Cardiff, where Geach's grandfather became Managing Director of an Iron Works.

At least two of his son would follow him in his profession.

Geach's mother was educated at the City of Cardiff High School for Girls.

She also attended Cambridge University in 1914.

She later registered as a Student at Oxford for the Hilary Term 1917.

Geach's mother kept terms at Oxford for three years, concluding with the Michaelmas Term 1919. 

Geach's mother's tutors included:

C.A.E. Moberly -- one of the two pseudonymous authors of the famous 1911 book "An Adventure", recounting their apparently ghostly encounter during a summer 1901 visit at the Petit Trianon in Versailles --

and

Dorothy Sayers. 

In between her time at Cambridge and Oxford, Geach's mother married George Hender Geach, born in Cardiff in 1884, died in Cardiff 1941.

Though born and died in Cardiff, George Hender Geach worked in the Education Service in India as a philosophy professor at Lahore.

(He later became principal at the teacher’s training college in Peshwar).

After a short period in India, Geach's mother returned to Britain, for the birth of their one child, Peter Thomas, born in LOWER Chelsea, London in March 1916, and who became a distinguished philosopher.

The marriage of Geach's parents was an unhappy one and was quickly broken up.

Up until around the age of eight, Peter Thomas Geach lived with his MATERNAL grandparents in Cardiff, after which time he was sent off to school by his father, Cardiff-owned George Hender Geach.

Peter Thomas Geach was raised by a guardian.

Peter Thomas Geach never saw his mother again after childhood.

As Eleonore Frederyka Adolphina Sgonina Geach, Geach's mother began publishing poetry while at Oxford.

Geach's mother collaborated on a small book of poems with a fellow student, D. E. A Wallace (1897-1989), who became a prolific novelist in the 1930s. 

The book was entitled "–Esques", and was published by B. H. Blackwell in May 1918. 

It includes eight poems by Geach's mother, nine by Wallace, and one collaboration.

The poems are divided into six sections headed Arabesques, Burlesques, Fresques, Grotesques, Humoresques, and A Picturesque, thus explaining the book’s implicatural title. 

One poem, “Episode”, in the Humoresques section seems to refer to Geach’s marriage: 

I loved you for a year
perhaps a little more
and now it’s all over
and I feel as though I had never known you
I feel no gaps, no longing
your passage through my life
was like the flight of a bird through the sky.

T.S. Eliot reviewed –Esques very briefly in The Egoist, noting wryly:

The authors of –Esques trickle down a fine broad page in a pantoum, a roundel, a villanelle, occasionally pagan, mode of thirty years ago:

Why then, O foolish Christ
Didst thou keep tryst
With maudlin harlots wan
With glad things gone?

To which the obvious answer is. Why did you? 

Young poets ought to be made to be cheaply printed; such sumptuous pages deceive many innocent critics.
(August 1918,  p. 99)

from Fifty New Poems for Children (1922)


Geach's mother, along with her former Oxford tutor,  D. Sayers, and T.W. Earp edited Oxford Poetry 1918.

They also published with Blackwell.

Earp co-edited the annual volume for the years 1915 through 1919.

Sayers joined him for three years, 1917-1919.

Geach's mother was involved only for the one year.

In the 1918 volume there are two poems by Geach and a third in collaboration with D.E.A. Wallace. 

One of these poems, consisting of eight lines and titled “Romance”, seems to have been an inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem “The Road Goes Ever On”, the first expression of which appears in the final chapter of The Hobbit, though its better-known versions appear in The Lord of the Rings. 

That Tolkien would have known the poem comes from the fact (first noticed by John D. Rateliff) that it was reprinted immediately after Tolkien’s own poem “Goblin Feet” in Fifty New Poems for Children, a slim volume published by Blackwell in 1922 (p. 28). The poem reads:

Round the next corner and in the next street
Adventure lies in wait for  you.
Oh, who can tell what you may meet
Round the next corner and in the next street!
Could life be anything but sweet
When all is hazardous and new
Round the next corner and in the next street?
Adventure lies in wait for you.

Geach's mother published one further booklet, Twenty Poems, which Blackwell released in March 1931.

The poems were all new to the booklet save for one, which was reprinted from The Poetry Review. 

These small volumes contain all of Geach’s known writings.  After her time in Oxford, she returned to her family in Cardiff, where she died in 1951. 

It's sad that Peter Thomas never saw his mother after his childhood. Why?

Well, because Geach would go on to attend Clifton, Oxford, and then start a teaching career in Birmingham and Leeds, where he retired as Professor Emeritus of Logic.