Christopher Royston George Ellis, known as Royston Ellis, was an English novelist, travel writer and erstwhile beat poet.
12 Facts About Royston Ellis
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Royston Ellis performed his poetry on stage and TV to backing by Cliff Richard's original group, the Shadows, as well as Jimmy Page, and featured in a 1960 TV documentary, Living for Kicks, presented by Daniel Farson, which brought him to national attention and controversy through his remarks on teenage lifestyle, and as a spokesman of his generation.
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Royston Ellis wrote two books in 1959 and 1961 about touring with Cliff Richard and The Shadows, republished in 2014 by Tomahawk Press as a rock and roll memoir.
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Royston Ellis bonded with Lennon in particular, both sharing an enthusiasm for the American Beat poets, and spent the week at 3 Gambier Terrace with Lennon, Sutcliffe, et al.
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Royston Ellis said of the meeting, "I was quite a star for them at that time because I had come up from London and that was a world they didn't really know about".
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Royston Ellis is one of the people the song "Paperback Writer" was based on, quoting a comment he had made years earlier while in Liverpool, and was present at a liaison between Lennon and "Polythene Pam" in Guernsey in 1963.
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Royston Ellis said she dressed up in polythene, which she did.
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Royston Ellis didn't wear jack boots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated.
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At 20, Royston Ellis retired from the teenage beatnik and rock and roll scene and left England permanently for a life of travel that took him to East Berlin and Moscow, where he read his poetry on stage with the Russian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko.
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Royston Ellis stayed in Las Palmas for three years, becoming the editor of the islands' English language newspaper, The Canary Islands Sun, and wrote three novels.
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Royston Ellis hiked around West Africa, then landed up in the British Virgin Islands before settling, in 1966, in Dominica where he wrote the best-selling Bondmaster series of historical novels as Richard Tresillian; as well as becoming President of the Dominica Cricket Association, a member of the MCC and of the Windward Islands Cricket Board of Control, and a Life Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society.
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Royston Ellis died of heart failure at his home in Induruwa, Sri Lanka, on 27 February 2023, at the age of 82.