Gilbert Frankau

Gilbert Frankau (21 April 1884 – 4 November 1952) was a popular British novelist. He was known also for verse (he was a war poet of World War I), including a number of verse novels, and short stories. He was born in London into a Jewish family, but was baptised as an Anglican at the age of 13. After education at Eton College, he went into the family cigar business and became Managing Director on his twenty-first birthday, his father, Arthur Frankau, having died in November 1904. A few months before his death, at sixty-eight, from lung cancer, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Frankau served in the British Army from the outbreak of war in 1914. He was first commissioned in the 9th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment on 6 October 1914, then transferred into the Royal Field Artillery in March 1915. He went to the Western Front as a brigade adjutant and fought in major battles of the British Expeditionary Force - Loos, Ypres and the Somme in France and Belgium and wrote for the Wipers Times. He was later promoted a Staff Captain in October 1916 for special duty in Italy. He was invalided out on 22 February 1918. His later used his wartime experiences in novels. The family business did not survive the war; Frankau became a writer.

His novels, while having conventional romantic content, also contained material from his own conservative politics and meditations on Jewish identity in the climate of the times. Some of them were filmed (see Christopher Strong; If I Marry Again was based on a short story). His status as a divorcé (he married three times) frustrated his political ambitions – the Conservative Party of the time did not regard divorce as acceptable. His outspoken criticism of Stanley Baldwin also did nothing to endear him to the Tory leadership.

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