R. F. Delderfield

Ronald Frederick Delderfield (February 12, 1912 - June 24, 1972) was a popular English novelist and dramatist, many of whose works have been adapted for television and are still widely read.

He was born in Bermondsey, London in 1912 to William James Delderfield (c1873 - 1956). His father worked for a meat wholesaler in Smithfield Market, and was also the first Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey Council. His father supported Women's suffrage and the Boer cause in the Boer War; was a firm supporter of Temperance, and, until he allied himself with the Conservatives, David Lloyd-George. From 1918 to 1923 the family lived at Addiscombe, near Croydon, Surrey, clearly influential in The Avenue series.

He attended an infant school in Bermondsey, then a "seedy and pretentious" small private school "seventy boys and four underpaid ushers, presided over by a jovial gentleman who wore blue serge". He then went to a council school which he hated but provided him with the prototype for Mr Short in the Avenue Story; this was followed by a grammar school whose dedicated teachers formed the basis of several of his characters. Once in Devon he went first to a co-educational grammar school and then finally West Buckland public school. In "For my own amusement" he joked that West Buckland could be likened to schools in The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon, The Avenue Story and A Horseman Riding By, and that it had earned its fees three times over thereby.

On a family holiday to Swanage when he was young, he caught scarlet fever and had to spend 3 months in an isolation hospital. Later in For My Own Amusement, he would divide the nation into city and suburb dwellers, rural dwellers, and those who lived in coastal towns.

His father and a neighbour in Bermondsey bought the Exmouth Chronicle, a local newspaper in Exmouth in 1923 and his father became the editor. In 1929, Delderfield joined the staff of the paper and later succeeded his father as editor. In For My Own Amusement, he describes his work - attending Magistrates' Courts, and Council meetings, amateur dramatics and other events, visiting the bereaved to write local obituaries, even cycling after the fire engine to see if there is a story, as well as relying on a large number of local correspondents.

His first published play was produced at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1936, the Birmingham Post wrote "more please, Mr Delderfield". One of his plays "Worm's Eye View" had a run at the Whitehall Theatre in London. Following service in the RAF during World War II, he resumed his literary career, while also running an antiques business near Budleigh Salterton, Devon. Having begun with drama, Delderfield decided to switch to writing novels in the 1950s. His first novel, Seven Men of Gascony, was published in 1949.

In For My Own Amusement he discusses the inspiration for the storylines and tells in anecdotes the origin of several of his characters. He believed that authors draw inspiration from the scenes of their youth, pointing out that Dicken's characters nearly always used the stagecoach when he was writing in the age of the train. He calls his sources "character farms", the main ones being his time in Addiscombe, Schooldays and his time at the Exmouth Chronicle. Of the Avenue and A Horseman Riding By he said "I set out to tell a straightforward story of a group of undistinguished British people - the only kind of people I really know".

Early 20th century social history

Several of Delderfield's historical novels and series involve young men who return from war and lead lives in England that allow the author to portray the sweep of English history and delve deeply into social history from the Edwardian era to the early 1960s.

Examples

• David Powlett-Jones of To Serve Them All My Days begins his teaching of history at a rural public school shortly after being released from a shell-shock ward in 1918. That novel examines the changes in private education and the development of the Labour political movement between the world wars.
• Adam Swann of the God is an Englishman series is a veteran of the British Army in India who forms a transport business in the mid-19th century. The unfinished series explores the economic history of England through the First World War.
• In the A Horseman Riding By trilogy, Paul Craddock, also an ex-soldier, becomes a rural landlord in Delderfield's own Devon in the early 20th century.
• The two-volume work The Avenue, which follows the residents of a middle-class suburban road over a few decades, begins shortly after the end of World War I with the return of one resident, who finds that his wife has died in the Spanish Flu epidemic and left him with several children to care for.

Other Works

Delderfield also published non-fiction books on Napoleonic history, historical novels involving the Napoleonic Wars, and some isolated novels set in more contemporary periods. His prose style, though more than competent, tends to be straightforward and readable, lacking in any influence from post-modernist fiction, and his social attitudes are fairly traditional, though his politics, as expressed via his characters, are progressive.

In general, Delderfield's novels warmly celebrate English history, humanity, and liberalism while demonstrating little patience with entrenched class differences and snobbery.

Criticism

Delderfield was criticized for his very conventional views of women's social roles, as he himself pointed out in his 1972 autobiography, For My Own Amusement.

Select bibliography

Delderfield's works include:

• All Over the Town (1947)
• Seven Men of Gascony (1949)
• The Adventures of Ben Gunn (1956)
• The Dreaming Suburb (1958) - (Avenue series)
• The Avenue Goes to War (1958) - (Avenue series)
• Mr. Sermon (1963) (also published as The Spring Madness of Mr. Sermon)
• Too Few For Drums (1964)
• A Horseman Riding By (1966) (published in the USA as two novels, Long Summer Day and Post of Honor)
• Cheap Day Return (1967)
• The Green Gauntlet (sequel to A Horseman Riding By)
• Come Home, Charlie, and Face Them (1969) (also published as "Come Home, Charlie]])
• God is an Englishman (1970) - (Swann saga)
• Theirs was the Kingdom (1972) - (Swann saga)
• For My Own Amusement (1972) (autobiographical).
• To Serve Them All My Days (1972)
• Give Us This Day (novel) (1973) - (Swann saga)
• Diana (1979) - (formerly published in 2 parts There was a Fair Maid Dwelling (1960) and The Unjust Skies (1962))