Ernest Charles Temple Thurston (23 September 1879 – 19 March 1933) was a British poet, playwright and author.
Biography
Thurston was born in Halesworth, Suffolk, England, the youngest of four children of brewery manager Frank Joseph Thurston and his wife Georgina Temple. The family moved from Halesworth to Maidstone and then, after the death of Georgina in 1895, left England to live with Thurston Snr's mother in Ballintemple, Cork. Thurston began his writing career with the publication of two books of poems when he was sixteen, followed two years later by The Apple of Eden.
It was while in Cork that Ernest met Katherine Cecil Madden, (1875–1911). She was older than her partner and had already enjoyed success as a journalist and novelist. The couple later married. After living in various places, the couple settled in a house in Kensington, with visits to their country cottage at Ardmore, Ireland. They lived together happily for some years and were known in literary circles, with Thurston adapting some of his wife's novels for the stage.
Temple Thurston's marriage did not last. The couple separated when he moved out in 1907, and their divorce was formalised in 1910. In September of the following year she was found dead in bed in a private hotel in Cork as the result of a seizure.
For many years, Temple Thurston found it difficult to make a living from writing and worked as a yeast merchant, brewer, research chemist, and commercial traveller before finally becoming a reporter. His first novel, The Apple of Eden was issued in a rewritten form in 1905, but it was not until the success of The City of Beautiful Nonsense, published by Newnes in 1909, that he found some kind of stability.
