On his mother's side, Robert was the grandson of Bernard Heldmann, who wrote under the pseudonym Richard Marsh and is best known for his supernatural novel
The Beetle (1897).
Robert Aickman was educated at Highgate School and thought of attending Oxford but declined to do so because it would have been too expensive for his father. His father, an architect, was of a generation that was losing its position in upper-class British society. During the years after Robert graduated from Highgate, his father made less money from his architectural work, and his mother spent time in an expensive nursing home for treatment of arthritis. Robert Aickman continued to live at home and helped his father in his business until eventually his father went to a nursing home. At the beginning of World War II Robert married Edith Ray Gregorson. His father died in 1941 at the age of eighty-three, leaving his son a small income, and his mother was killed by a German bomb during the war.
Robert and Edith Aickman set up a literary agency, and in 1946 Robert and L. T. C. Rolt founded the Inland Waterways Association, a privately funded organization to improve British waterways, which dominated a large part of Aickman's life.
This is a free page. This page contains 185 words. This
biography contains 2,346 words (approx. 8 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Robert (Fordyce) Aickman Access Pass.
