Derek Tangye

Who was Derek Tangye?

Derek Alan Trevithick Tangye was a British author who lived in Cornwall for nearly fifty years. He wrote 19 books which became known as 'The Minack Chronicles', about his simple life on a clifftop daffodil farm called Dorminack, affectionately referred to as Minack, at St Buryan in the far west of Cornwall with his wife Jeannie. The couple had given up sophisticated metropolitan lives, he as a newspaper columnist and she as a hotel PR executive, to live in isolation in a simple cottage surrounded by their beloved animals, which featured in nearly all his works. His brother Nigel Tangye was also an author. They were grandsons of the engineer Richard Tangye. The first of The Minack Chronicles was 'A Gull on the Roof' published in 1961. Great Minack Stories is "An omnibus edition of Way to Minack, "A Cornish Summer and Cottage on a Cliff which gives an account of the author's time with MI5 and how he came to be living in a deserted cottage close to the cliffs of Mount's Bay in Cornwall".