Gilbert Frankau

Biography

British poet and novelist Gilbert Frankau was born in London, England, in 1884. His family was Jewish, but he converted to Anglicism and was baptized at 13. After graduating from Eton College, he entered the family cigar business, eventually becoming Managing Director of the company. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he joined the British army. Commissioned as an officer, he was eventually posted to a field artillery unit in France, and fought in such major battles as Ypres, Loos and the Somme. He was invalided out of the army in 1918, and returned home to find that the family cigar business did not survive the war. At that point he decided to become a writer, as he had some experience writing for various British newspapers while posted to France. A staunch conservative, he harbored political ambitions and tried to get backing from the Conservative Party to run for the House of Commons, but his string of marriages and divorces--the party considered divorce "unacceptable"--nixed that possibility. His right-wing politics also worked against him with the general public--after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Frankau wrote an article for the notoriously right-wing "Daily Express" titled "As a Jew I am Not Against Hitler" did him no good with the public, and he later retracted it. He died of lung caner in Hove, England, in 1952.