Caryl Brahms

Caryl Brahms, born Doris Caroline Abrahams (8 December 1901 – 5 December 1982), was an English critic, novelist, and journalist specialising in the theatre and ballet. She also wrote film, radio and television scripts.

As a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Brahms was dissatisfied with her own skill as a pianist, leaving without graduating. She contributed light verse, and later stories for satirical cartoons, to the London paper The Evening Standard in the late 1920s. She recruited a friend, S. J. Simon, to help her with the cartoon stories, and in the 1930s and 40s they collaborated on a series of comic novels, some with a balletic background and others set in various periods of English history. At the same time as her collaboration with Simon, Brahms was a ballet critic, writing for papers including The Daily Telegraph. Later, her interest in ballet waned, and she concentrated on reviewing plays.

After Simon's sudden death in 1948, Brahms wrote solo for some years, but in the 1950s she established a second long-running collaboration with the writer and broadcaster Ned Sherrin, which lasted for the rest of her life. Together they wrote plays and musicals for the stage and television, and published both fiction and non-fiction books.

Brahms was born in Croydon, Surrey. Her parents were Henry Clarence Abrahams, a jeweller, and his wife, Pearl née Levi, a member of a Sephardic Jewish family who had come to Britain from Turkey a generation earlier. She was educated at Minerva College, Leicestershire and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she left before graduating. Her biographer Ned Sherrin wrote, "already an embryo critic, she did not care to listen to the noise she made when playing the piano."

While at the Academy, Brahms wrote light verse for the student magazine. The London evening newspaper The Evening Standard began to print some of her verses. Brahms adopted her pen-name so that her parents should not learn of her activities: they envisaged "a more domestic future" for her than journalism. The name "Caryl" was also usefully ambiguous as regards gender. In 1926, the artist David Low began to draw a series of satirical cartoons for The Evening Standard, featuring a small dog named "Mussolini" (later shortened to "Musso", after protests from the Italian embassy). Brahms was engaged to write the stories for the cartoons.

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