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John Coates
John Coates (1912-63), novelist and author of Patience
John Coates was born in 1912 into a Yorkshire engineering family. He went to Haileybury and then read English at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time acting and writing plays and became President of Footlights. After travelling in the United States and Europe, in 1935 he married Sonja van Blaaderen and lived with her in Holland until the outbreak of war, when he returned to England and joined the War Office. After the war he settled in Kensington. His four sons were born between 1936 and 1947, the year his first published play Tomorrow’s Child appeared. Time for Tea, his first novel, came out in 1948 and his eleventh and last, Logic No Lady, in 1959. Patience (1953) was dramatised in 1955 (with Geraldine McEwan in her first role) and translated into French. True as a Turtle (1955) was made into a film. John Coates also wrote a continuation of Jane Austen’s The Watsons and several more plays. He died after a long illness in 1963.
