11 Facts About Tim Jeal

Tim Jeal's publications include a memoir and biographies of David Livingstone, Lord Baden-Powell, and Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Tim Jeal was born in London, 27 January 1945 to civil servant Clifford Freeman Jeal and Norah Margaret Sabine, daughter of Sir Thomas Edward Sabine Pasley, 3rd Baronet, and Constance Wilmot Annie Hastings, daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon.

Clifford Tim Jeal, about whom his son published a memoir in 2004, was a Christian mystic and follower of the Anglican Order Of The Cross fellowship and as such practised pacifism and vegetarianism.

Tim Jeal is married to Joyce Tim Jeal and they have three daughters.

Tim Jeal has been writing books since the 1960s, for London and New York-based publishers.

In Baden-Powell, Tim Jeal offers a revisionist account of Lieutenant-General The 1st Baron Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, restoring his reputation which had deteriorated during the 20th century.

However, Tim Jeal speculated that Lord Baden-Powell was a homosexual, even a repressed one, and this sparked a great deal of attention in the popular press culminating in scouting organisations reissuing an earlier biography of Baden-Powell by William Hillcourt to dilute attention and sales of Tim Jeal's book.

In 1995, Tim Jeal's book was the basis for a TV documentary in the Channel 4 series "Secret Lives" entitled Lord Baden-Powell: The Boy Man.

Tim Gardam said in The Observer that Jeal had 'fulfilled a mission to rehabilitate one of the most complex heroes of Victorian Britain'.

Tim Jeal had unique access to the massive Stanley collection in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels and saw many letters, diaries and other documents unseen by previous biographers.

Tim Jeal has pitched the book as an update to Alan Moorehead's The White Nile.