E. E. Speight

Ernest Edwin Speight (6 December 1871 – 17 September 1949), usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan and also at the Fourth Higher School, Kanazawa, then for a further twenty years at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. In India he made a study of the Nilgiri hill tribes and was working on a Toda grammar at his deathIn Speight's youth he was a friend of W. B. Yeats, A. E. Housman and George Bernard Shaw, in his latter years of Tagore, Aurobindo, Mohandas K Gandhi, and Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark for whom he reviewed some of his writings.In addition to teaching, Speight wrote a substantial number of English textbooks, some of which remain in use in the 21st-century English syllabus in India. Speight also wrote fiction, poetry, music, and edited anthologies. With his business partner R. H. Walpole, Speight formed The Saracen's Head Library, a publishing house based in Teignmouth, in Devon.