Gai Eaton

Life and career

Early life Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in London under the name Gai, Eaton was the son of the married Englishman Francis Errington and his mistress, Ruth Frances Muddock ; to hide her son's illegitimacy, Ruth claimed that she had been married to a Canadian, Charles Eaton (an invention of Errington's, by then supposedly deceased), and that Charles had fathered the child. Eaton was educated at Charterhouse School and King's College, Cambridge, where he studied history and entered into a correspondence with the novelist Leo Myers. As a diplomat, Eaton's postings included the Colonial Office outpost in Jamaica and the Deputy High Commission office in Madras, India, as well as others in Trinidad and Ghana. In 1996, he served on the committee that drafted the constitution of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Eaton was frequently critical of mainstream British Muslim opinion, and believed that Muslims themselves should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in the 2000s. Regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in an interview with Emel magazine, he stated, "I am very torn either way and I cannot quite make up my mind what I think ... [Saddam] was our monster, it should have been for us to deal with him. But we are so hopeless and helpless we leave it to other people who have their own motives and their own objectives. In the same article, Eaton called for the creation of a British Islamic identity: "It is time for the Muslims in Britain to settle down, to find their own way, to form a real community and to discover a specifically British way of living Islam. The constant arrival of uneducated, non English-speaking immigrants from the subcontinent makes that more difficult."

His works include The Richest Vein (1949), and Remembering God: Reflections on Islam (2000). He frequently contributed articles to the quarterly journal on comparative religion and traditional studies, Studies in Comparative Religion. Eaton's last book and autobiography, A Bad Beginning and the Path to Islam (2009), was published by Archetype in January 2010. Many British converts to Islam have been inspired by his books,

Personal life

From his first marriage (1944–50) to the actress Kay Clayton, he was the father of Leo Eaton (b. 1945), director and producer of documentary films. In 1956, Eaton married Corah Hamilton, an expatriate Jamaican artist, with whom he had one son and two daughters; Hamilton died in 1984. Eaton was the grandson of the author and journalist J. E. Preston Muddock.

He is buried in the Muslim Section of Brookwood Cemetery.