Ronald Frankau

Ronald Hugh Wyndham Frankau (22 February 1894 – 11 September 1951) was an English comedian who started in cabaret and made his way to radio and films.

Frankau was born in London, the third child of Arthur Frankau, son of Joseph Frankau, a German Jew who came to London from Frankfurt in the late 1830s and started a cigar trading business. His mother was Julia Davis Frankau, who would later become a celebrated writer of satirical novels. His mother's siblings included Henry Irving's mistress Eliza Aria and theatre critic and librettist Owen Hall, whilst their sister Florette was married to architect Marcus Collins, a brother of Drury Lane Theatre manager Arthur Collins. His brother Gilbert Frankau, in his memoirs, states that it was "obscure" why their mother "tacked the stage-famous 'Wyndham' onto the 'Ronald Hugh'" in Frankau's name.

Frankau's siblings were Gilbert, Jack and Joan. Gilbert went into the family cigar business (living and working in Germany throughout 1902 to learn something of the trade) until the Great War, was a war poet and subsequently a novelist, while his daughter Pamela Frankau would also become a novelist. Jack was killed leading his platoon in the Third Battle of Gaza in November 1917. Joan married the historian Henry Stanley Bennett and, as a Cambridge don in her own right, Joan Bennett was one of the defence witnesses in the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960.

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