Posted by Robert Hill on September 09, 1999 at 13:31:33 from 129.11.153.35 via proxy proxy2.leeds.ac.uk:
Peter Duck carries a dedication to the (fictional) mothers of the
Swallows and Amazons; it's a clever idea that a book which is meant
to be regarded as a "story within the story" should be dedicated to
characters in the outer story.
The dedication is to "Mrs E.H.R. Walker and Mrs Robert Blackett",
following the old-fashioned convention (still alive only a few years
ago, and possibly today, on Wimbledon tennis scoreboards) of referring
to married women by their husbands' first names or initials.
So E.H.R. are actually Commander Walker's initials. The E obviously
stands for Edward (in WDMTGTS, he signs telegrams "Ted" and is
addressed as Ted by his wife).
All this has been said previously on Tarboard. The purpose of this
message is to point out that Ernest Altounyan's initials were also
E.H.R. This may well be already well known to some of you, but
I don't remember seeing it mentioned on Tarboard before.
It's thanks to Jeremy Kriewaldt's reply to Robert Howes, mentioning
the Bookfinder web site, that I learned this. I tried out Bookfinder
by giving it "Altounyan" as an author's name, expecting to find only
books by Taqui, but it found also "Ornament of Honour", a book about
T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) by Ernest Altounyan.