Alfred Charles Gissing

Alfred Charles Gissing, born in Epsom, Surrey, England, was an English writer and headmaster, and the youngest son of the English novelist George Gissing. Alfred went as a boarder to Gresham's School, Holt, becoming a House Prefect. While at Gresham's School, Alfred had been in the junior division of the Officers' Training Corps from January 1910 to August 1914, when, with war apparent, Alfred joined the British Army in July 1914. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in December 1915, and promoted to lieutenant in July 1917. After the war, Alfred Gissing remained in the army, serving in Iraq and then working for the Inter-Allied Censorship Committee between May 1919 and February 1920, when he left the service with the rank of Captain.

At about the time he left the army, Alfred assumed his father's posthumous interests from Algernon Gissing, and he went to live at Fernleigh, St Mark's Avenue, Leeds, Yorkshire, which had been Margaret and Ellen Gissing's home. He began to develop a collected edition of his father's works and to correspond with publishers and collectors as literary executor. From 1924 until 1927, he lived in Richmond, Surrey. He wrote a preface for A Victim of Circumstances by George Gissing (1927), a collection of his father's short stories, and he edited a compendium of his father's work, Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing (1929). In his own right, Alfred Gissing wrote biographies.

After the Second World War, Alfred settled at Salvan in the Swiss canton of Valais, an area well known to George Gissing, where Alfred founded and ran an English school for children displaced by the war, subsidised by UNESCO. Alfred and his family moved to Les Marécottes, near Salvan, where they purchased a hotel in 1951, and remained there for the rest of his life. He died and was buried at Salvan in 1975.

Sources: Military Wiki and Wikipedia