Hubert Jennings papers (Ms.2016.002)

Biographical / Historical

Hubert Dudley Jennings was born on 12 November 1896 in the district of Hornsey, now a subdivision of the London Borough of Haringey. He was the youngest of seven children born to a family that endured a series of financial trials during his early years. When World War I broke out in 1914, Jennings volunteered for military service. He served for several years and was wounded more than once; one such injury caused the loss his left eye. Following the war, Jennings began his undergraduate studies at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (later Aberystwyth University), where he prepared for a career as a teacher. During this time he met and befriended the Belgian painter Valerius de Saedeleer and his family, who were living in Wales at the time.

After finishing his degree, Jennings found his prospects for employment in the United Kingdom to be limited. In 1923, he moved to Durban, South Africa, then under British colonial rule, where he began teaching at the Durban High School. Jennings remained at the D.H.S. until 1935. Thereafter, he would serve as headmaster at schools in the towns of Stanger (later KwaDukuza), Greytown, and Dundee until his retirement in 1956. In the late 1950s, Jennings was invited to write a book about the history of the Durban High School to commemorate the school's centennial. The book was published in 1966 under the title The D.H.S. Story 1866-1966.

In the course of his research on the Durban High School and its alumni, Jennings learned that the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa had attended the school around the turn of the century. Jennings became deeply interested in Pessoa's poetry and would devote much of the rest of his life to the poet's work. Jennings began studying Portuguese around this time, in order to study and translate Pessoa's writings. He established contact with surviving members of Pessoa's family, and with their support successfully applied for funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation to support an extended research trip to Lisbon. Jennings spent about eighteen months in Portugal in 1968-1969, during which period he prepared extensive transcriptions of Pessoa's writings and began work on several book projects about Pessoa's life and poetry designed to increase the poet's visibility in the English-speaking world.

In the early 1970s, Jennings attempted to publish his research on Pessoa, but was unable to find a venue. He then submitted his major findings in the form of a thesis to the University of Wales, College of Cardiff, for which he was awarded a master's degree in 1977. In the same year, Jennings prepared a paper with his friend, noted Pessoa scholar Alexandrino Severino, for the first International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa (at Brown University), which Severino presented in Jennings's absence. After many years of residence in South Africa, Jennings moved back to England in 1981. In 1983, Jennings travelled to Nashville, Tennessee to attend the Second International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa at Vanderbilt University, where he met many leading scholars in the field. He subsequently published two versions of a book on Fernando Pessoa: Os Dois Exílios: Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul (1984) and Fernando Pessoa in Durban (1986).

In the last years of his life, as he continued to work on a variety of other literary projects including fiction and translations, Jennings began writing a memoir/diary that eventually grew to more than four volumes in length and in which he wrote of many stages of his life, from his earliest memories to the events of the present (such as the death of his wife, Irene, in 1988).

Jennings married Irene (née Kennedy) in 1933. The couple raised two children: Christopher Jennings and Bridget Jennings Winstanley. Hubert Jennings died in 1991.