Christopher Serpell

{{Short description|British journalist}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2022}}

{{Use British English|date=July 2014}}

{{infobox person

| name = Christopher Harold Serpell

| birth_date = {{birth date|1910|07|01|df=yes}}

| death_date = {{death date and age|1991|06|03|1910|07|01|df=yes}}

| birth_place = Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

| death_place = Barnes, London, England

| occupation = Journalist

| notable_works = From Our Own Correspondent

| known_for = BBC's Rome and Washington Foreign Correspondent

}}

Christopher Serpell (1 July 1910– 3 June 1991) was a journalist and BBC diplomatic correspondent.

Serpell was born in Leeds, England, in 1910.{{cite web|url= https://www.faber.co.uk/author/christopher-serpell/ |title=Christopher Serpell|publisher=Faber and Faber|access-date=14 August 2014 }} He was educated at Leeds Grammar School - where his father was senior master - and at Merton College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1929.{{cite book|editor1-last=Levens|editor1-first=R.G.C.|title=Merton College Register 1900–1964|date=1964|publisher=Basil Blackwell|location=Oxford|page=211}}

Serpell began his career as a reporter for the Yorkshire Post. In the 1930s he began working for The Times in London. With a fellow journalist, Douglas Brown,{{cite web|title=Brown, Douglas|url=http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/brown_douglas|website=The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction|accessdate=9 December 2016}} he wrote the novel If Hitler Comes (first published in 1940 as Loss of Eden), which imagines a Britain that has ostensibly made peace with Germany but has in effect surrendered.{{cite web|title=If Hitler Comes|url=https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571254095-if-hitler-comes.html|website=Faber & Faber|accessdate=9 December 2016}}

During World War II, he served in naval intelligence under Ian Fleming. He subsequently joined the BBC as its Rome correspondent, then Washington correspondent from 1953, and finally diplomatic correspondent, until retirement in 1975.

He appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs on 31 March 1973.{{cite web | url = http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009n941 | title = Desert Island Discs - Castaway: Christopher Serpell | publisher = BBC Online | work = iPlayer Radio | access-date=14 August 2014 }}

He died in 1991 at his home in Barnes, South London.