Barrie travelled in high literary circles, and had many famous friends. With Arthur Conan Doyle he wrote a failed musical. With Robert Louis Stevenson he conducted a long correspondence, but the two never met in person. George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbor, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. Jerome K. Jerome introduced Barrie to his wife; H. G. Wells was a friend of many years. J.M. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London. Conan Doyle, Jerome, Wells and other luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton and A. A. Milne also occasionally played cricket with a team founded by Barrie for his friends, the "Allahakbarries" (the name was chosen under the mistaken belief that "Allah akbar" means "God save us" in Arabic - in fact it means "God is great").
Barrie also befriended Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and was one of the seven recipients of letters that Scott wrote in the final hours of his life. He was godfather to Robert's son, Peter Scott. [1] Another close friend of Barrie's, theater producer Charles Frohman, died famously, declining a lifeboat seat when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic, reportedly paraphrasing Peter Pan's final line from the stage play, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."On several occasions he met and told stories to the little girl who would become Queen Elizabeth and her little sister Princess Margaret.
The Llewelyn Davies family
photo of J M Barrie
The Llewelyn Davies family consisted of the parents Arthur (1863–1907) and Sylvia, née du Maurier (1866–1910) (daughter of George du Maurier), [married the 3Q of 1892 in Hampstead, London: GROMI: vol. 1a, p. 1331]; and their five sons George (1893–1915), John (1894-1959), Peter (1897–1960), Michael (1900–1921), and Nicholas (1903–1980). Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897 or 1898 after meeting George and Jack with their nurse (i.e nanny) Mary Hodgson in London's Kensington Gardens. He lived nearby and often walked his dog Porthos in the park. He did not meet Sylvia until a chance encounter at a dinner party brought them into social contact.
He became a surrogate father to the boys, and when they were orphaned, he became their guardian. Sylvia Llewelyn Davies' will specified her wish to have Barrie be trustee and guardian to the boys, alongside her mother, her brother Guy Du-Maurier and Arthur Llewelyn Davies' brother Compton. When copying the will informally for Sylvia's family, Barrie inserted himself in an additional paragraph: Sylvia had written that she would like Mary Hodgson, the boys' nurse, to continue taking care of them, and that perhaps "Jenny" (Mary's sister) could come help; Barrie wrote "Jimmy" (Sylvia's nickname for him) instead of "Jenny". Mary Hodgson in fact did stay and continue caring for the boys until they were all in school and Jack was married. (Chaney, p. 285)
Friendship with children
Although there will always be those who find cause for suspicion in his friendship with children, there is no evidence that anything inappropriate happened, and the youngest of the boys, Nico, flatly denied that Barrie ever behaved in an unfit manner. Barrie was married to the actress Mary Ansell but it was a sexless and childless marriage and ended in divorce, highly unusual and stigmatised in those times.The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon a photograph of Michael, but the sculptor decided to use a different child as a model, leaving Barrie very disappointed with the result. "It doesn't show the devil in Peter", he said.
Barrie suffered bereavements with the boys, losing the two to whom he was closest. George was killed in action (1915) in World War I. Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily, drowned (1921) in a possible suicide pact one month short of his 21st birthday, while swimming at a known danger-spot at Oxford with his friend and possible lover Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton. Some years after Barrie's death, Peter Davies, later a publisher, wrote his Morgue, which contains much family information and comments on Barrie.