The American poetess Barbara Howes (b. 1914) wrote "At Mrs Alefounder's", a poem about the Alefounder bird/wildlife sanctuary, Tobago, West Indies. This was published in The Blue Garden (1972) and later in Collected Poems, 1945-1990 (1995), pp 98-99.
Robert Palfrey Utter (1875-1936) wrote the short story "My Neighbor and
Myself", published in Harper's Monthly Magazine, March 1921, pp 528-530
and in Pearls & Pepper (1924), pp 48-53. This tells of a man who moves into
a small community and is subjected to a few practical jokes and tall tales by
his neighbours. One such involved the right of way along an adjacent path which
a previous owner of his house, Ruel Alefounder, had refused to buy.
Robert
Palfrey Utter was a Professor of English at the University of California; where
he came across the name I have no idea.
The only other fictional use of the name I know of occurs in the adventure novel "Tell it on the drums" by Robert Wilson Krepps, published in South Africa, 1955, and by Hale in 1957. The story is set in South Africa in the 1880s. "Alefounder" has charge of some diamonds, property of Cecil Rhodes. These are stolen by a gang of thieves who travel north from Kimberley, fall out and eventually meet their deaths. Again, I have not discovered how or where the author learnt of the name.
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Last updated 26th February 2008 by Peter Alefounder |
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