The sudden death of Humbert Wolfe at the age of 54 may be set down as one of the civilian casualties of the war, for, like so many of his colleagues in Whitehall, he had been working at extreme pressure during recent months. Throughout his life he had managed to follow the arts without in any way evading the full duties of a civil servant at a time when those duties became ever more exacting owing to the complicated nature of modern social legislation and the administrative problems which it raises. The Victorian civil servant with literary gifts could expect to find leisure for poetry or journalism, or both. Humbert Wolfe fitted these activities on to the top of a much longer working day and found time also to keep company and to practise, none better, the art of conversation. It was always a wonder to his friends how he managed to do so much, and now they will the more keenly regret that he lived at such a strain.
Outside the Ministry of Labour he will be remembered mainly as a poet. That official correspondence in no way affected his prose style was shown in the grace and humour of his memory about childhood in Bradford, where he was brought up as a Yorkshire boy of Italian Jewish stock and sharing all the North Country delights of a Yorkshire Christmas, tobogganing and going to the great garish and uproarious Bradiord pantomimes. His brilliance at Bradford Grammar School carried him on a udo of academic success to Wadham College at Oxford, and on to Whitehall,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.