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Maurice Roy Ridley (25 January 1890 – 12 June 1969) was a writer and poet, and Fellow and Chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford.
Ridley was the son of William Dawson Ridley, a Church of England clergyman, Rector of Orcheston St Mary, Wiltshire, and his wife Jane Elizabeth Rutherford. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and Balliol College, Oxford.[1][2]
His grandfather, Thomas Dawson Ridley, a civil engineer of Coatham, Yorkshire, died in 1898, leaving a substantial fortune.[3] His father died in 1899 in Bordighera.[4]
From 1920 to 1945, Ridley was a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol. He spent 1930–1931 as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College under the auspices of the Tallman Foundation. He was a lecturer at Bedford College, University of London, from 1948,[1] where he earned a Doctorate of Humane Letters.
On 23 September 1922, he married Katherine Scott in Cleveland, Ohio.[5]
Dorothy L. Sayers based the physical description of her character Lord Peter Wimsey (the archetypal British gentleman detective) on that of Ridley after seeing him read his Newdigate Prize-winning poem "Oxford" at the Encaenia ceremony in July 1913.[6][7]