E. E. Speight

Who was E. E. Speight?

Ernest Edwin Speight, usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan and also at the Fourth Higher School, Kanazawa, then for a further twenty years at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. In India he made a study of the Nilgiri hill tribes and was working on a Toda grammar at his death

In Speight's youth he was a friend of W B Yeats, A E Houseman and George Bernard Shaw, in his latter years of Tagore, Aurobindo, Mohandas K Gandhi, and Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark for whom he reviewed some of his writings.

In addition to teaching, Speight wrote a substantial number of English textbooks, some of which remain in use in the 21st-century English syllabus in India. Speight also wrote fiction, poetry, music, and edited anthologies.

With his business partner R H Walpole, Speight formed The Saracen's Head Library, a publishing house based in Teignmouth, in Devon.