Charles Gidley Wheeler

Born 21 August 1938

Educated at University College School, London; Royal Naval College, Dartmouth; University of Durham.

1954-1979: served in the Royal Navy as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, minesweeper captain, Qualified Flying Instructor, and Senior Pilot of Airborne Early Warning squadron.

1960s: articles and stories for Blackwoods Magazine.

1970s: drama scripts for the BBC TV series ‘Warship’ and ‘Wings’ and for Yorkshire Television’s ‘The Sandbaggers’ and ‘Thundercloud’.

1981 - 1992: published six novels, The River Running by, The Raging of the Sea, The Believer, Armada, The Fighting Spirit and The Crying of the Wind.

1993: Married Susan Keeble, Artist. Extended family: five children, ten grandchildren.

1997 - 2000: attended University of Durham to read Philosophy. (Gabbett Prize winner, 1998). Graduated BA (Hons).

2004: Basic Flying Instruction, A Comprehensive Introduction to Western Philosophy published by iUniverse.

2005: Jannaway’s Mutiny published by iUniverse.


Currently divides time between England, France and Portugal.

Hobbies: caring for olive and almond trees; swimming in the sea; sailing in my dinghy; eating well but inexpensively; thinking; listening to birdsong.

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Excerpt from my memoir A Good Boy Tomorrow:-

As my literary ambition took precedence over my naval career, and my criticism of the leadership of the Royal Navy made me increasingly unpopular with authority, I was shunted into less prestigious appointments, first as an inspector of ships building, later to naval recruiting, and finally to a sinecure on a NATO staff in Portugal, where I spent most of my office hours and spare time writing The River Running By. Published in 1981, a year after I left the navy, it was featured as the book of the month on the front cover of The Bookseller magazine.

My second novel, The Raging of the Sea, was accepted by Diana Athill, my editor at Deutsch, within four days of submission. And after writing The Believer, which is about the beginnings of the Plymouth Brethren in the nineteenth century, a very charming literary agent called Felicity Bryan whisked me onto the books of Curtis Brown with a commission to write an historical novel about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

After Armada was published, Andy McKillop, my editor at Collins, suggested that I write a book about Dunkirk, and, while researching The Fighting Spirit I retraced the tracks of Guderian’s tanks, and learnt more about the horrors of those weeks in 1940 when my father was racing for the coast with a division of German panzers at his heels.

At the end of 1990 my marriage broke up and I got together with, and later married, Susan Keeble, an artist and book illustrator whose paintings I framed and whose star continues in the ascendant. By this time, I had been handsomely commissioned by HarperCollins to write a novel about the Anglo-Argentine relationship and the Falklands War. But then something rather disturbing happened. After I had submitted the typescript of the novel, which I was to call The Crying of the Wind, Michael Shaw, my agent at Curtis Brown, gave me an anonymous critique of it, signed “C” that rubbished it, calling it “little more than a soppy love story.”

This was a completely misleading description, as the novel describes the insidious destruction of an Anglo-Argentine family, the corruption, torture, and assassination that went on in Argentina in the years prior to the Falklands conflict, the criminal activities of the illegal Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due (P2), and events aboard a hospital ship during the Falklands conflict in 1982.

Before writing the novel, I had done extensive research in Argentina. I had stayed on estancia, and had interviewed a number of people closely connected—and affected—by the Dirty War, including a nursing sister who served aboard a British hospital ship during the Falklands campaign, the leading journalists Andrew Graham-Youll, of the Buenos Aires Herald, Jesus Iglesias Rouco, editor of La Prensa, and the widow of a university professor in Salta, who had been “disappeared.”

Mike Shaw declined to inform me of the identity of “C”. Having written episodes for the television spy series The Sandbaggers, whose fictional director of MI6 is known by the same code letter, I was able to put two and two together and guess that, because of its content, my book was being actively discouraged, probably by the Ministry of Defence.

For a while my confidence faltered and I considered withdrawing The Crying of the Wind before publication; but it was published in 1992, albeit with minimal publicity, and when the paperback came out the following year it was in exceedingly small print and virtually invisible in bookstores. It was quickly remaindered, and my publishers informed me that they would not be commissioning any more of my work.

I was then tax investigated and falsely accused of defrauding the Inland Revenue of £20,000. I was refused a grant on a house that had no inside bathroom, and all planning applications I submitted to the local council were blocked.

In the space of ten years, I had written six long novels, three of which had been published in the USA and all of which had been well reviewed. Now, my writing career was dead in the water. I was being killed off. As Jeff Arch, the scriptwriter of Sleepless in Seattle remarked to me during a screenwriting seminar, “You never know where the bullet comes from.”

All the same, I have a pretty good idea. The Royal Navy and the security services wield considerable influence over the publishing industry in Britain. The Secretary to the “D” Notice Committee has access to all novels submitted for publication, and is able to forbid publishers to publish and put pressure on agents not to represent. It would only have taken a phone call from the secretary of the “D” Notice Committee (Rear Admiral Pulvertaft, with whom I joined the Navy as a cadet in 1954) to jam the brakes on my writing career.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this; I doubt whether I shall ever know the truth of the matter. But I do know that no agent or publisher has expressed any interest in my work since publication of The Crying of the Wind in 1992, and that my most recent novel, Jannaway’s Mutiny, published by iUniverse in 2005, was very negatively and in one respect untruthfully reviewed in the Naval Review by Vice Admiral Louis le Bailly.

Other authors have been similarly discredited by naval authority. David Tinker’s A Letter from the Falklands appears to have been deleted from the Amazon list. After publication of his novel The Gunroom, published in 1919, about the bullying of midshipmen before the Great War, Charles Morgan was pressurized to withdraw it; Terence Rattigan was harassed by the Admiralty after the stage production of The Winslow Boy; and David Divine’s Mutiny at Invergordon has been effectively suppressed. It seems that the Royal Navy is unable to bear even the slightest criticism of itself. The Naval Review is edited by a retired rear admiral, and is available only its officer members, who are not permitted to reveal its contents to non-members or the press.

As things turned out, all was for the best when someone took steps to bring my literary career to an end. Had that not happened, my son might never have given me Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and I might never have decided to sharpen my intellectual saw by taking a degree in philosophy at the University of Durham.

My three years at university were the most intellectually exciting and stimulating of my life. At long last, I was being trained to think and argue logically, to open my mind, to read closely and intelligently, and to differentiate between rational arguments and those that are merely persuasive.

The course I took (Philosophy, Single Honors) was splendidly wide-ranging, and I was fortunate to be tutored by professors with international reputations, including E.J. Lowe, Patrick FitzPatrick, Geoffrey Scarre and David Knight. Thanks to these philosophers, I found my intellectual equilibrium. (For more on that subject, go to Last Words on this website.)