thumb|right|Howard Spring

Howard Spring (10 February 1889 – 3 May 1965) was a Welsh author and journalist. He began his writing career as a journalist but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels for adults and children. The most successful was Fame Is the Spur (1940), which was later adapted into a film starring Michael Redgrave, and later still a BBC TV series (1982) starring Tim Pigott-Smith and David Hayman.

Biography

Howard Spring was born in Cardiff, the son of a jobbing gardener. He was forced to leave school at the age of twelve, when his father died, to start work as an errand boy. He later became an office boy at a firm of chartered accountants in Cardiff Docks and then a messenger at the offices of the South Wales Daily News. He was keen to train as a reporter, and spent his leisure time learning shorthand and taking evening classes at Cardiff University, where he studied English, French, Latin, mathematics and history. He graduated to be a reporter on both the morning and evening editions of the South Wales Daily News.

In 1911 he joined the Yorkshire Observer in Bradford before moving in 1915 to the Manchester Guardian, but was there only a few months before he was called up for the Army Service Corps as a shorthand trained clerk, serving in France in Douglas Haig's General Headquarters.

His first major success in the adult market came with My Son, My Son (1937), originally titled O Absalom. It gained success in America, listed as a national fiction best seller in The English Journal for eight consecutive months, starting in July 1948. The novel was adapted as the American 1940 film My Son, My Son! and later made for television by the BBC in 1977. WorldCat libraries report editions in Chinese, German, Hebrew and four other languages.

In 1939 Spring moved to Mylor in Cornwall to become a full-time writer. (His wife Marion's father had a house at St Mawes.) In 1940, his best-known work appeared: Fame Is the Spur, the story of a Labour leader's rise to power. During the war years Spring wrote two other novels, Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley's (1946).

In 1947 Spring and his wife moved to Falmouth, The White Cottage in Fenwick Road, and in the post-war period he published There Is No Armour (1948), The Houses in Between (1951), A Sunset Touch (1953), These Lovers Fled Away (1955), Time and the Hour (1957), All the Day Long (1959), I Met a Lady (1961), and his last book was Winds of the Day (1964). Spring also produced three volumes of autobiography: Heaven Lies About Us, A Fragment of Infancy (1939); In the Meantime (1942); and And Another Thing (1946), later published in one volume as The Autobiography of Howard Spring (Collins, 1972).

During this period Spring served eight years as President of the prestigious Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society and as a Director of the Falmouth School of Art and President of the Cornish Drama League. The last was well known for producing plays at the open-air Minack Theatre on the cliffs near Land's End.

Spring was a successful writer, who combined a wide understanding of human character with technical skill as a novelist. His method of composition was painstaking. Each morning he would shut himself in his room and write a thousand words, steadily building up to novels of around 150,000 words. He rarely made major alterations to his writings.

Howard Spring died of a stroke. In 1967, his widow, Marion Spring, wrote an affectionate story of their life together, called Howard, with a foreword by A. L. Rowse. It was published by Collins.

Works

  • Darkie And Co, (1932)
  • Shabby Tiger, (1934)
  • The World's Greatest Detective Stories, (1934)
  • Rachel Rosing, (1935)
  • Sampson's Circus, (1936)
  • O Absalom (title in US: My Son, My Son), (1938)
  • Book Parade, (1938)
  • Heaven Lies About Us, (1939)
  • Fame Is the Spur, (1940)
  • Tumbledown Dick: All People And No Plot, (1939)
  • All They Like Sheep, (1940)
  • In The Meantime, (1942)
  • This War We Wage, (1942) [with E M DELAFIELD & Herbert MORRISON]
  • Hard Facts, (1944)
  • And Another Thing, (1946)
  • Dunkerley's, (1946)
  • There Is No Armour, (1948)
  • Christmas Honeymoon, (1949)
  • Christmas Awake, (1949)
  • The Houses in Between, (1951)
  • Jinny Morgan, (1952, play)
  • A Sunset Touch, (1953)
  • Three Plays, (1953) [Jinny Morgan; The Gentle Assassin; St George...]
  • These Lovers Fled Away, (1955)
  • Time and the Hour, (1957)
  • All the Day Long, (1959)
  • I Met a Lady, (1961)
  • Winds of the Day, (1964)

Source:

See also

  • The Queen's Book of the Red Cross

References

  • "Formats and Editions of Sampson's Circus" at WorldCat
  • Howard Spring Manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Manchester.