Shabby Tiger

Howard Spring (10 February 1889 – 3 May 1965) was a Welsh author and journalist who wrote in English. 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 Fame is the Spur starring Michael Redgrave and, later still the BBC TV series Fame is the Spur (1982) starring Tim Pigott-Smith and David Hayman.

Howard Spring was born in Cardiff, the son of a poor jobbing gardener. Spring 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. Spring was keen to train as a reporter, and he 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 until he was called up for the Army Service Corps as a shorthand typist.

After the war, he returned to the Guardian, where he worked as a reporter. C. P. Scott, the editor, apparently regarded Spring's reporting skills highly; he wrote of Spring that: "Nobody does a better 'descriptive' or a better condensation of a difficult address." In 1931, after reporting on a political meeting at which Lord Beaverbrook was the speaker, Beaverbrook was so impressed by Spring's piece that he arranged for him to be offered a post with the Evening Standard in London, as a book reviewer. Spring described the offer as "irresistible" and the appointment proved very successful.

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