Douglas Howard Gresham
(1945- )
The adopted son of C. S. Lewis, Douglas Gresham was born in Queens, New York, on November 10, 1945. He was the younger son of the novelist William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962) and Joy (née Davidman) Gresham. His brother, David Howard, was born in 1944. Seeking a life closer to nature, the family moved to Ossining, New York. Later, thanks to the success of their father’s novel Nightmare Alley (1946), they moved into a spacious house on Pleasant Plains near Staatsburg. These beautiful landscapes and grounds became linked with Douglas’s earliest memories and inspired his lifelong love of open fields and forests. He later described Pleasant Plains as:
“...dark, cool pines greeting the gentle dogwoods and the majestic, tall maples...”
His mother, born into an ethnically Jewish family, converted to Christianity in 1946, influenced in part by the writings of Lewis. His father, however, found his own path, describing his spiritual journey as:
“Baptized an Episcopalian, raised an agnostic, also a Unitarian, hedonist, Stoic, humanist, self-taught mystic, eclectic grab-bag... after all that I finally came home.” (At any rate, they presented themselves as a Christian family when they attended the Presbyterian church in Pleasant Plains, where Joy, David, and Douglas were baptized in 1948.)
The year 1950 proved decisive for the Greshams. Chad Walsh inspired Joy to write to Lewis, thus beginning a lively correspondence. At the same time, Douglas noticed his father becoming interested in Dianetics, the religious-scientific system created by L. Ron Hubbard. Douglas saw how his mother delved ever more deeply into Christianity, while his father fell under the destructive influence of Scientology. Tensions and conflicts led Joy to travel to England in 1952, hoping to meet Lewis.
Upon her return to Staatsburg, she and Bill Gresham decided to divorce. In November 1953, David and Douglas moved with their mother to London. The boys first met Lewis on December 17, 1953, when he invited them to visit him at The Kilns. Deeply moved by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Douglas remembered meeting its author with these words:
“Was this the heroic figure my mother so often spoke of? Even so, I had never met anyone whose face was more alive than the man himself.”
Speaking with Nell Berners-Price on December 26, 1953, Lewis described the boys as:
“Phew! Delightful creatures... but so lively!”
In January 1954, Douglas and his brother were enrolled at Dane Court School near Woking, Surrey. On August 5 of the same year, their parents finalized their separation, and that very day their father married Joy’s cousin, Renée Pierce. Later that year, the family moved to 10 Old High Street, Oxford, where they were able to see Lewis more frequently. In order to obtain British citizenship, Joy married him on April 23, 1956, which also made the boys citizens.
Douglas became aware that his mother was suffering from pain in her left leg. While he was at school in October 1956, Lewis wrote to tell him that Joy had broken her leg and was in hospital. Upon returning home, he learned she had cancer and was dying. To bring comfort, a priest married Lewis and Joy in Wingfield-Morris Hospital on March 21, 1957. Despite the grim prognosis, Joy’s condition improved dramatically. In a letter to Laurence Harwood dated December 12, 1957, Lewis wrote:
“My wife has made a miraculous recovery...”
At this time, the boys lived with Lewis at The Kilns.
“And so, I came...,” Douglas wrote, “...for the first time into a ‘home,’ into The Kilns. Jack showed me all the charms and secrets of the woods and the lake; he showed me the bomb shelter Paxford [Fred Paxford, Lewis’s gardener and the model for Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle] had built for himself. At first I could hardly understand his speech because of his Cotswold burr, but I liked him immediately.”
In April 1957, an unexpectedly happy period began: their mother returned home.
“When I came home from school,” Douglas recalled, “I gained my education at the dinner table. Jack and Warnie were perfect in sustaining a conversation, no matter how difficult the subject or what it was about. I learned more in those talks at table than even at school.”
In the spring of 1960, Douglas entered Lapley Grange School in Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire, Wales. He loved the school so much that he rose to head prefect. But his mother remained gravely ill, and he and his brother visited her shortly before her death on July 13, 1960.
“Douglas, as always, is doing well,” Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on August 30 that year. “And he is a bright little star in my life." The next month, Douglas was enrolled at Magdalen College School, Oxford. He later wrote: “My life experiences had set me so far apart from the other boys that I could not, nor even dreamt of, lessening the gulf between our minds.””
Lewis later arranged for a tutor to prepare Douglas for important exams, after which he attended Applegarth, a private school in Godalming, Surrey. It was there he received the devastating news that his father, Bill Gresham – whom he had last seen in 1960 – had died in September 1962. Perhaps the person who helped him most in this period was his mother’s friend Jean Wakeman, who lived in Horton-cum-Studley near Oxford. An unmarried woman, she became a second mother to Douglas, taking him into her home after the death of C. S. Lewis on November 22, 1963.
When life had settled somewhat, Douglas went to “Chargot,” the Somerset farm of Sir Edward Malet, for agricultural training. During the six months he spent there, he met and fell in love with Malet’s Australian niece, Meredith “Merrie” Conan-Davis, then a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. After his farm training and a year at agricultural college, Douglas married Merrie on February 20, 1967, at Westminster Cathedral. Thinking of farming in Australia, the couple soon sailed for Tasmania. Many happy events followed: the birth of their children James (1968), Timothy (1969), Dominique (1971), and Lucinda (1976). He also wrote the final chapters of Lenten Lands, his memoir about growing up with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis. In 1990, Douglas and Merrie adopted a five-year-old girl from Korea, Melody.
After the death of Warnie Lewis in 1973, Douglas devoted himself tirelessly to the legacy of C. S. Lewis. Having moved to Ireland, his family was closer to London, where he could dedicate more time to this work. Yet this was far from his only endeavor. As deeply committed Christians, he and Merrie turned their home into the European center for the Institute for the Study of Infanticide and Child Abuse. At the same time, he founded Rathvinden Ministries, a multifaceted Christian mission in Ireland. During his frequent visits to Oxford, he stayed with Jean Wakeman. Finally, after thirteen years in Ireland overseeing the ministry, Douglas acquired a small house in Malta.
“There...,” he wrote to Walter Hooper on July 7, 2006, “we hope to fulfill whatever tasks the Lord sends us.”
One of his greatest ambitions, which brought him back to that first moment of meeting Lewis, was the film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In this, as in much else, he succeeded. After discussions with Walden Media, the project grew steadily. At last, the film, produced by Walden Media and Disney, premiered on December 7, 2005. Douglas, who served as co-producer, attended with his children and grandchildren.
In addition, he published Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C. S. Lewis (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman & Holman, 2005).
David Lindsay Gresham
(1944-2014)
Adopted son of C. S. Lewis. He was born on March 27, 1944, in New York City to William Lindsay Gresham, a novelist, and Helen Joy (née Davidman) Gresham. His brother, Douglas, was born on November 10, 1945. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Ossining, New York. A few months later, thanks to the success of their father’s novel Nightmare Alley, they were able to return to Dutchess County, New York – this time to Staatsburg – where they lived in a large house on Endekill Road.
According to his mother’s biography, tensions in the family drove her to England in August 1952, where, after five months, she met Lewis. In November 1953 she left her husband and moved with her two sons to live near Lewis. For David, who was attached to his home, this was a trial. After settling in London, David and Douglas entered Dane Court Preparatory School (now closed) in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey. David never liked England: he struggled to understand the accents and eventually found his studies uninteresting. Nearly 30 years later, he remarked:
“I went through a lot because of my parents: their divorce, and then my exile to England.”
David first met Lewis on December 17, 1953, when the family spent four days at The Kilns (Lewis’s home in Oxford). In a letter to Bill Gresham dated December 22, Joy wrote:
“The boys were a great success with the Lewises.” She also mentioned that Warnie and Jack taught David to play chess and that “…he astonished them all by picking it up so quickly.”
In 1954 his parents were formally divorced, and in August 1955 Joy and her two children settled in Headington, at 10 Old High Street. Now they had their own house with a garden. During this time, Joy asked Lewis to teach David Latin. They had been in Oxford only a few months when Joy discovered she could not renew her passport; and to prevent deportation, she and Lewis were married at the registry office on April 23, 1956. This allowed Joy to secure British citizenship and the status of an “Englishwoman,” which in turn extended citizenship to David and Douglas.
A few months later, Joy was diagnosed with cancer, and David and his brother were invited to live at The Kilns with Clive and Warnie Lewis. By the spring of 1957 doctors were almost certain their mother was dying, and on March 21, 1957, she and Lewis were married again, this time before God, in a religious ceremony conducted by an Anglican priest at Wingfield-Morris Hospital in Oxford. Writing to his sister Penelope on March 6, 1957, Lewis described David as:
“…a humorously suitable stepson for me, very like what I was myself as a child – a bookworm and a pedant.”
Almost miraculously, by September 1957 the cancer had gone into remission, and David left Dane Court to become a day student at Magdalen College School. From the age of eleven he had been interested in Judaism, and after his mother’s death on July 13, 1960, this interest became central to his life. Lewis allowed him to take private lessons in Hebrew from Ronald May, an editor at Oxford University Press. In a letter to Walter Hooper in 1995, David wrote that the true reason for his love of Judaism was God’s grace, since the essential meaning of Judaism is drawing near to God. Another motivating factor was his Anglophobia. While learning the basics of Hebrew, David began teaching himself Yiddish. He was fortunate to meet Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, one of the leading scholars of Yiddish, and took lessons from him during the winter of 1961–62.
At that time, he attended the Oxford synagogue, and on April 1, 1962, he visited Carmel College, an Orthodox Jewish boarding school and seminary in Wallingford. Rabbi M. I. Jan, a teacher there, advised David to attend a yeshiva in Gateshead, in northern England. But one of the rabbis there told him first to complete his A-levels at a Jewish school in London before enrolling in yeshiva. On April 15, 1962, David arrived in London and, after several months, became a student at the North West London Talmudical College on Finchley Road, where he studied for a year.
From London he went to New York, where he studied until early 1966, primarily at Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin under Rabbi Isaac Hutner, its senior rabbi. In 1966 he returned to England and lived briefly in London. There he decided he ought to go to university, which required him to pass A-levels. After a period of independent study he passed exams in German, logic, and Biblical Hebrew. In 1967 he went to Israel, where he studied nine months at a Jewish yeshiva in Jerusalem, followed by a year at the Hebrew University, where he studied Arabic. David returned to England in 1969 and that autumn entered Magdalen College, Cambridge – where Lewis had once taught. He read Oriental Studies (Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew), graduating with first-class honors in 1972.
In 1974 David Gresham moved to Spain, where he lived until 1977, and then went on to live in Paris. During those years he devoted himself to studying Hebrew, Latin, and many other languages. In order to continue yeshiva studies, he moved to Montreux, Switzerland. The yeshiva was later relocated to Jerusalem, and in 1985 David settled into his own home in Ireland.
From 1985 onward David spent three to four months each year in India. On November 1, 1992, he married Miss Padmavati Hariharan in the Magen Avot Synagogue in Alibag, Maharashtra. They had two sons: Joseph Isaac, born May 17, 1994, and Ishmael Iyer, born April 23, 1996. In a letter to Walter Hooper in 1995 David wrote:
“My main task is to study the Hebrew Bible and Talmud and their commentaries, languages, and literature. I have a strong interest in pursuing further Jewish education.”
David Gresham died on Christmas Day, December 25, 2014. He left his widow, Padmavati Gresham, and their sons, Isaac and Ishmael.
For further information, we recommend consulting the biography by Lyle Dorsett, as well as reading books such as Lenten Lands (1988) and And God Came In (1983).
