Brandon Thomas

Walter Brandon Thomas (24 December 1848 – 19 June 1914) was an English actor, playwright and songwriter, best known as the author of the farce Charley's Aunt.

Born in Liverpool to a family with no theatrical connections, Thomas worked in commerce, and as an occasional journalist, before achieving his ambition of becoming an actor. After a succession of minor roles, he became increasingly sought after as a character actor. He also wrote more than a dozen plays, the most celebrated of which, Charley's Aunt (1892), broke all historic records for plays of any kind, with an original London run of 1,466 performances and numerous subsequent productions all around the world, film and musical theatre adaptations.

Although Thomas never repeated the prodigious success of Charley's Aunt, he maintained a career as an actor and dramatist until his death, acting mostly in comedy, but with occasional serious roles in the plays of Shakespeare and others.

Thomas was born in Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, the eldest of the three children of Walter Thomas (d. 1878), a bootseller, and his wife, Hannah, née Morris. He was educated at the Liverpool Institute and later at a private school in Prescot, Lancashire. At the age of 14, he enlisted in the Royal Marines but was bought out after six weeks and apprenticed to a shipbuilder. He learned bookkeeping and became a clerk with local Liverpool timber merchants, until 1875, when he took a similar post in Hull, where his family was by then living.

Thomas augmented his salary with occasional journalism; The Times noted that at 17 he published "a striking pamphlet" attacking the hymn-writers Moody and Sankey. His chief love, however, was the theatre. He appeared as an amateur in Hull, singing and reciting at temperance concerts, and performing in music halls and drawing room entertainments, playing the piano and singing his own songs. Through the influence of a local businessman, Albert Rollit, he secured an engagement with William and Madge Kendal at the Court Theatre in London. He made his first professional stage appearance there at age 30, in April 1879, as Sandy in The Queen's Shilling.

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