Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, 3rd Baronet (2 March 1926 – 7 March 2014), better known by his pen name Thomas Hinde, was a British novelist.
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Life
Thomas Chitty was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, England, the son of Sir Thomas Henry Willes Chitty, 2nd Baronet, a barrister, and his wife Ethel Constance Gladstone, daughter of Samuel Henry Gladstone. He was educated at Winchester College and University College, Oxford. After service in the Royal Navy, he worked briefly for the Inland Revenue and then for the Shell Petroleum Company, before becoming a full-time writer. He became a baronet on the death of his father in 1955.
Chitty married Susan Hopkinson (1929-2021), daughter of the novelist Antonia White, in 1951; the couple remained married until his death in 2014 and had four children. Hinde and his wife, also an author writing under the name Susan Chitty, lived at Bow Cottage, West Hoathly, West Sussex, a village on the edge of Ashdown Forest in the High Weald.
Pseudonym
The surname Hinde belonged to Chitty's family history on his mother's side. Samuel Henry Gladstone (1853–1932) was son of Robert Gladstone, the younger (1811–1872), of Highfield, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, a member of the Liverpool Gladstone family. Robert Gladstone married in 1852 Anne Mary Hinde, daughter of Samuel Hinde of Lancaster; and after her death another Miss Hinde, a cousin of his first wife.