The Beast with Five Fingers

William Fryer Harvey AM was born on 14th April 1885 into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire.He was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before university at Balliol College, Oxford. His health was fragile and he poured his energies into writing short stories and in 1910 published his first collection ‘Midnight House’.In the Great War he was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and then served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. There he received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving but lung damage received at that time troubled him for the rest of his life.He continued to write short stories, and even a memoir, but by 1925 ill health had forced his retirement to any outside work. Three years later he published his second collection which contained his macabre classic ‘The Beast with Five fingers’, only one more collection would come from his pen in his lifetime.For many years of his life he now lived in Switzerland with his wife but a yearning to be home saw them come back to England in 1935.W F Harvey died in Letchworth on the 4th June 1937. He was 52.