Gordon Walmsley

Professor Gordon Walmsley, often known as Gordon Walmsley of Goole, is a fictional character created by Brian Lumley, frequently referred to in his Cthulhu Mythos tales. An expert of translating ancient texts, Walmsley is first mentioned in Lumley's "The Sister City" (1969); the work most often attributed to him, Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions, appears first in "Billy's Oak" (1970). Walmsley's most extended appearance is in "In the Vaults Beneath" (1971). 
Walmsley is described in "In the Vaults Beneath" as a "stout, balding, bespectacled little professor." 
==Biography==
Gordon Walmsley comes from Goole in Yorkshire,Wikipedia, "Goole." a town he is so identified with that he is repeatedly referred to as "Gordon Walmsley of Goole." 
The professor achieves fame with his "feats of antiquarian deciphering," becoming an "expert on the Phitmar Stone—that contemporary of the famous Rosetta Stone with its key inscriptions in two forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs—and the Geph Columns Characters."Brian Lumley, "Rising With Surtsey." Titus Crow acknowledges him as "the country’s greatest paleographer"--the only one who surpasses himselfBrian Lumley, "Name and Number." --and includes him among a select group of "notable gentlemen students of matters concerning things not usually apparent or open to the man in the street."Brian Lumley, "De Marigny's Clock." Wingate Peaslee calls Walmsley "the greatest ever in his field."Brian Lumley, The Transition of Titus Crow. Hamilton Tharpe, on the other hand, denounced him (along with Sir Amery Wendy-Smith) as "mere dabblers" who "only scratched the surface."Brian Lumley, "The Fairground Horror." 
In 1952, Walmsley is curator at the Radcar Museum in Radcar, Yorkshire, where he studies a green figurine discovered in a Yorkshire stream and dates it as being over 10,000 years old.Brian Lumley, "The Sister City." 
Sometime before 1955, he publishes Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions, the work for which he is best known.Brian Lumley, "Billy's Oak." 
In October 1962, Anderson Tharpe seeks Walmsley's help in translating a text, but the professor is away at the Buenos Aires Museum of Antiquities, "busily translating the hieroglyphs on certain freshly discovered ruins in the mountains of the Aconcaguan Range near San Juan." 
By 1963, Walmsley has a position as professor-curator of the Wharby Museum in Wharby, Yorkshire. In November of that year, he is asked by author Philip Haughtree a passage in the diary of his brother and co-author, Julian Haughtree. 
While at Wharby, Walmsley becomes obsessed with the G'harne Fragments, which lead him to the discovering of the prehistoric complex known as The Outpost and to his eventual grisly demise.Brian Lumley, "In the Vaults Below." 
==References==
Category:Characters Originating From Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Humans