He was born in the small town of Kapal in the Kazakh steppes of Central Asia, to British explorers Lucy Atkinson and Thomas Witlam Atkinson, who named him after the famous Tamshybulak Spring in Qapal and the Alatau Mountains (Tien Shan), and spent the first ten years of his life in Siberia, Central Asia, and St Petersburg. After his father's death in Kent, England when Alatau was ten years old, a public fund-raising appeal by Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society, helped finance Alatau's education at Rugby School. After a brief career in Russia as Secretary of the Turko-Russian boundary commission, he changed careers to become a writer for the British newspaper Newcastle Courant. He briefly held a teaching position in England at Durham School.
