R. F. Delderfield

Ronald Frederick Delderfield (12 February 1912 – 24 June 1972) was an English novelist and dramatist, some of whose works have been adapted for television and film.

Biography

Childhood in London and Surrey

Ronald Frederick Delderfield was born at 37 Waller Road, New Cross, London, in 1912 to Alice and William James Delderfield (c. 1873–1956). His father worked for a meat wholesaler in Smithfield Market, and was the first Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey Council. William supported women's suffrage and the Boer cause in the Boer War. He was a firm supporter of the temperance movement, and of David Lloyd George until the latter allied himself in government with the Conservative Party. From 1918 to 1923, the family lived at 22 Ashburton Avenue, Addiscombe, near Croydon, Surrey. The Avenue novels were based on Ronald's life in Addiscombe and Shirley Park.

Delderfield 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 which provided him with the prototype for Mr. Short in The Avenue. This experience was followed by a grammar school whose dedicated teachers inspired several of his characters. Once the family moved to Devon, Delderfield first attended a co-educational grammar school and, finally, West Buckland School. In his autobiography For My Own Amusement, Delderfield joked that West Buckland could be likened to schools in The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon, The Avenue and A Horseman Riding By, and that it had earned its fees three times over. Again, in For My Own Amusement, Delderfield divided the nation into city and suburb dwellers, rural dwellers, and those who lived in coastal towns.

On a family holiday in Swanage when he was young, Delderfield caught scarlet fever and had to spend three months in an isolation hospital.

Residence in East Devon

In 1923, Delderfield's father and a neighbour in Bermondsey bought the Exmouth Chronicle, a local newspaper in Exmouth, and William 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, covering amateur dramatics and other events, visiting the bereaved to write local obituaries, even cycling after the fire engine to see if there was a story, as well as relying on a large number of local correspondents. His experiences during this period were clearly mirrored in the romantic novel Diana. In 1962 he had a house, 'Dove Cottage' (now 'Gazebo'), built on Peak Hill in Sidmouth.

Delderfield's 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, and was filmed in 1951 with Diana Dors. 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, a tale of French soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars, was published in 1949 by Werner Laurie. In 1950 he featured in a BBC Newsreel clip of the short-lived The Axminster and Lyme Regis Clarion in Lyme Regis.

Autobiography

In For My Own Amusement (1972), Delderfield 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 Charles Dickens' characters nearly always used the stagecoach, when he was writing in the age of the train. Delderfield 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." Delderfield pointed out in this autobiography that he had been criticized for his very conventional views of women's social roles.

Death

Delderfield died at his home, then called Dove Cottage, in Sidmouth of lung cancer, and was survived by his widow, the former May Evans, whom he married in 1936. They had a son and a daughter. A brother, Eric Delderfield (1909–1995) survived him and wrote several books on the history of England's West Country.

Early 20th century social history as a subject of his writing

Several of Delderfield's historical novels and series involve young men who return from war and take up careers in peacetime that allow the author to delve deeply into social history from the Edwardian era to the early 1960s.

Examples

David Powlett-Jones of To Serve Them All My Days is from a Welsh working-class background and 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 series explores the economic history of the United Kingdom from the 1860s to the outbreak of 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.