Amyas Stafford Northcote

Amyas Northcote was a British writer from an aristocratic family.

Northcote was the youngest child and seventh son of Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh (the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Disraeli) and his wife Cecilia Frances Farrer, sister of Thomas Farrer, 1st Baron Farrer.

He married Helen May Dudley on 14 May 1890. The couple had two children, a daughter Cecilia and a son the Rev. Dudley Northcote, both of whom died unmarried.

Amyas Stafford Northcote was born in Upton Pyne, Devon, and was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Disraeli.

Educated at Eton, Northcote spent some time in the United States, where he married Helen Dudley in 1890, their two children being born in Chicago. Northcote was an investment banker, and a wealthy man; the 1911 census shows him living in a nineteen-room property in Berkhamsted.

He wrote articles on various subjects for popular magazines, and one book, 'In Ghostly Company', a collection of ghost stories in the style of M.R. James. When the book went out of print, copies became much prized by afficionados of the ghost story, until the book was republished by Wordsworth Editions in 2010. One likely reason why Company was Northcote’s only book was because it was published in 1921 and he died soon afterwards in 1923, before he had much chance to follow it with further fiction, ghostly or otherwise.

Northcote spent some time in Chicago, running a small business there.

He was for several years a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire.