C.L. Skelton

Represented by John Silbersack

Actor, director, playwright, wartime fighter pilot, lay brother in a religious order, monster hunter, and novelist, Clement Lister Skelton lived a life scarce to be believed were it fiction rather than fact.

Born in 1919 in the North of England, son of a professional army officer, he began his theatrical career, aged fourteen, in a touring Shakespeare company. By 1938, he was well-established on the British stage and on the verge of a Hollywood breakthrough, but war was on the horizon, and he left all to join the RAF.

Trained as a Spitfire pilot, he fought in the Battle of Britain, and later engaged in high altitude photographic reconnaissance, serving throughout the war. De-mobbed in 1946, he returned to stage and to film (on both sides of the camera,) played in repertory companies and in the West End, but again left, entering the London house of the Roman Catholic Society of Saint Paul, employing his film maker’s skills on behalf of the Church, until seven years later, and before final vows, returning to the world.

Then, in the early nineteen-sixties, those same skills saw him in the Scottish Highlands serving as camera technician to a friend’s expedition to film the monster of Loch Ness.

Settled in the Highlands, Clem Skelton met and married American student, (and daughter of two writers,) Alison Scott, with whom he had two sons, and beside whom he began his career as a novelist. His first serious work was the bestselling family saga, Hardacre.