Stephen Potter

Stephen Meredith Potter (1 February 1900 – 2 December 1969) was a British author best known for his mocking self-help books and their film and television derivatives.

After leaving school in the last months of the First World War he was commissioned as a junior officer in the British Army, but by the time he had completed his training the war was over and he was demobilised. He then studied English at Oxford, and after some false starts he spent his early working life as an academic, lecturing in English literature at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London, during which time he published several works on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Finding his income inadequate to support himself and his family, he left the university and took up a post producing and writing for the BBC. He remained with the BBC until after the Second World War, when he became a freelance writer, and remained so for the rest of his life.

His series of humorous books on how to secure an unfair advantage began in 1947 with Gamesmanship, purporting to show how poor players can beat better ones by subtle psychological ploys. This sold prodigiously and led to a series of sequels covering other aspects of life. The books were adapted for the cinema in the 1960s and for television in the 1970s.

Potter was born in Battersea, London, the only son of Frank Collard Potter (1858–1939), a chartered accountant, and his wife Elizabeth Mary Jubilee née Reynolds (1863–1950). He attended Westminster School from age 13 to 18, during the First World War. As he reached school-leaving age he wrote in his diary, "If this war doesn't end soon I shall have to join the beastly army and lay down my blooming life for my blinking country." He volunteered for the army, was trained as an officer and "passed out" (graduated) as top of his company. He was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards as a second lieutenant just as the war was ending, and did not see active service.

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