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Anthony Cru was a reclusive English writer best known for The Mulgrave Trilogy, a haunting series of folk horror tales that gained a quiet but devoted cult following. Born in 1950, he spent most of his working life employed by British Steel. In a twist of fate, he was made redundant in 2015, just shy of retirement. Rather than leaving the industrial landscape behind, he made an unconventional choice: he remained at South Gare, living in a weather-beaten old caravan near the very place he had laboured for decades.

It was there, among the wind-scoured break-water and corroded remnants of industry, that he began to write. In just six solitary years, Cru produced The Mulgrave Trilogy, a set of strange and alluring stories steeped in salt air, rust, and the uneasy pull of the sea. Locals said he rarely ventured far, preferring to walk the breakwaters alone or sit outside his caravan at dusk, scrawling longhand in battered notebooks.

Cru often spoke of the land beneath his feet with a mixture of reverence and suspicion. “We stole this place from the sea,” he once said, claiming that 70,000 tons of dredged mud had been piled up to claim the shoreline. “One day,” he warned, “the sea will remember.”

On the 3rd of November 2021, Anthony Cru died suddenly at the age of 71. He left behind no family of his own, only the whispering legacy of his Mulgrave tales and the lingering sense that he had been waiting for something vast and tidal to return.