Eldest son of Henry Huxley, served in the
British Army from 1914, became battalion bombing officer. Received the
Military Cross on the first day of
Passchendaele for capturing prisoners whose presence showed the arrival of a fresh German Guards Division. Demobilised in 1919.
Gervas was recruited in 1939 to help set up the wartime
Ministry of Information. After the war he sat on the Executive Committee of the
British Council, and became a successful author of biographies.[11][12] He died at
Chippenham in 1971.
Gervas's second marriage was to
Elspeth Grant (1907–1997) in 1931; she had grown up in
Kenya and was a friend of
Joy Adamson. After the marriage she wrote White man's country:
Lord Delamere and the
making of Kenya. Her life and work are the subject of a 2002 biography.[14] As an author, Elspeth Huxley was well up to Huxley standards, and one of the few wives who was better-known than her husband.
The flame trees of Thika (1959) was perhaps the most celebrated of her thirty books; it was later adapted for television. They had one son, Charles, b.1944.