The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey

After a funeral service at the local Friends Meeting House Harvey was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Old Letchworth. He moved to Letchworth in 1935 and died there in 1937 at the age of 52. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England. In 1928 he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement. Harvey's grave in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Letchworth Post-war career īefore the war he had shown interest in adult education, on the staff of the Working Men's College, Fircroft, Selly Oak, Birmingham. The damage troubled him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good-natured memoir We Were Seven (1936). He received lung damage during his award-winning rescue operation. In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910). Early life īorn into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. Among his best-known stories are ' August Heat' (1910) and 'The Beast with Five Fingers', described by horror historian Les Daniels as 'minor masterpieces'. Harvey, was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. William Fryer Harvey AM (14 April 1885 – 4 June 1937), known as W.

The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey