Ernest Bramah biography- Book extracts

Book extracts

Extract one

Ernest's education began at a dame school and a private boarding school. From here in 1880 he was sent to the Manchester Grammar School (where he seems to have dropped the second 'm' in his name) which then, as now, had a reputation for outstanding teaching and results. Many years later he wrote that in Dr. Samuel Dill's day 'it was a good public day-school where De Quincey was educated though he was not very grateful to it'.

However Ernest was a poor scholar. William White writing in the summer edition 1966 of the school magazine about Bramah's time there begins his article: 'If there had been a poll at the Manchester Grammar School in 1884 on the Student Least Likely to Succeed, one of those in the front running would have been Ernest Bramah or, as he was then known. Ernest Brammah Smith'. The missing autobiographical story manuscript, The School-days of Philip Jenkins would doubtless have given a much more detailed description of life at the Manchester Grammar School in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

His reports must have left his parents, so ambitious for their children, distraught. In the Middle 1st form he was thirty-first out of thirtyone; in the Upper 1st Classics sixteenth out of twenty-six. His usual position in most subjects was in the lower half of the class. With neither School Certificate nor Matriculation he could not enrol at any University and certainly not Oxford to follow in the steps of his elder brother Charles.

At a time when compulsory education was only up to the age of 10, all that could be said was that he had at least completed most of his secondary education. He may only have been able to reach a middle of the class position in Classics but the successful writer he became was able to introduce, effortlessly, references to and comparisons with classical figures and situations. Similarly his unremarkable performance in science did not damp his interest in the subject and many of his successful books and stories were to have scientific contents central to the plot.

At the end of the autumn term of 1884 his parents removed him from the Manchester Grammar School. What happened to his education in the next year is not known. Possibly he had a private tutor - his father could certainly afford it - or he went to another school.

At the age of seventeen Ernest's parents were doubtless greatly concerned when they had to decide, with him, just what career he could follow. University was not an option given his poor academic record. His 'fixed intention to have just such another shop [as Batty's] if I failed to induce Mr. Batty to take me into partnership meanwhile when in the progress of growing up I should be called upon to choose a career' was firmly rejected by his parents.

That his parents consented to him giving up his education suggests that they were both wise and indulgent or both, or maybe just desperate. Ernest had expressed an interest in a career in farming because in his own facetious words 'of a pleasure I derived from keeping ducks'. They acceded to his choice and they generously arranged to fund his pupillage and provide an income to support himself during his apprenticeship. Circumstances proved that this was not to be the least of their expenditure. As events turned out their agreement to this career choice may have been a mistake.

Extract two

There is little doubt that Charles Smith was an indulgent father. He was also uncritical and still optimistic about his son's future. Despite the heavy losses Ernest incurred in his disastrous farming career his father now agreed to him trying his hand at journalism in London. He gave him an allowance as well as, to quote from Ernest's autobiographical note, 'a small assortment of works all explaining how large incomes might be made in various branches of literature, none of which, I regret to say, I have yet found time to read, much less profit by.' The allowance, as Ernest later remarked, had guaranteed to save him from the romance of actually starving as George Gissing and Jerome K. Jerome had done. He arrived in London probably some time in 1893. Heading for Grub Street, inhabited by indigent writers and journalists and from which they all aspired to escape, must have been an unnerving experience for a young man whose previous existence had either been with his family in the suburbs of Manchester or in the country. He was not rich so could not share the paradise that London offered to the wealthy nor, fortunately, was he poor so forced to experience the hell that London was for the impoverished. The migration from the country to the town was still in full flow. Crowded, the population of London had grown to six and half million by 1900, it was as filthy, foggy and squalid as the Gustave Doré's drawings depicted it. A gloomy sink of soot and screeching iron, huddled tenements, tiny back yards with a privy and washing lines and everywhere stench and smoke. The destitute, who Jack London called 'people of the abyss', crammed into any space, most particularly churches, to fester and die.

This was the London to which Ernest now journeyed and hoped to make both his fortune and his reputation. He described himself as 'timorous' so that the move was an act of considerable bravery. Unlike Arthur Waugh whose father had also given him an allowance to try his luck in London as a free-lance journalist he did not have Waugh's advantage of being a relation of Edmund Gosse who introduced him into the glittering literary scene of London. Bramah knew few, if any, people in London and he had to face the problems of finding suitable accommodation within his limited means, employment and making friends and contacts. Journalism was his new chosen career but his achievements to date as a free-lance correspondent for a local paper would not impress any would-be employer.

He wisely spent his first months in London acquiring skills that were necessary accomplishments for journalists and learned shorthand, like Dickens before him, and typing. The growth in literacy had led to an explosion in the numbers and types of newspapers and journals which were started to meet a huge public demand for features and fiction. This provided the opportunity for free-lance work, something that he showed considerable knowledge of in his later writings. Nothing with a Bramah by-line has been located and it might be inferred his freelancing was not very successful.

Clearly his network in the literary world had not yet developed to the extent of providing him with the personal contacts and introductions he needed. But for once fate was on Ernest's side. The college where he was acquiring his secretarial skills also had an employment agency that sent him to see Jerome K. Jerome, the author of the highly successful Three Men in a Boat and publisher of the very popular magazine, The Idler. Jerome was about to launch To-day magazine and 'wanted someone to do his correspondence'. Ernest would suit. He was now on the first step of the literary ladder.

Extract three

It is virtually impossible to describe or compare the style Ernest Bramah developed for the Kai Lung books. There is nothing similar. The most effective way to convey to anyone who has not read the stories is to quote from them, and no excuse is given for doing so, at length. But no extract can do full justice to Kai Lung. He must be read in the whole to be appreciated and to understand his true worth but the flavour of the tales can perhaps best be savoured from the aphorisms and maxims which are to be found in every narrative, sometimes several on one page and from examples of the polished, exaggerated, refined and elaborate language.

Here is a declamation from the leader of a band of robbers:
"It would be useless to conceal from a person of your inspired intelligence that I am indeed Lin Yi" continued the robber. "It is a dignified position to occupy and one for which I am quite incompetent."

One character can be recognised as a shop steward seeking to impose a closed shop on his employer:
"Suitable greetings, employer of our worthless services," remarked their leader, seating himself upon the floor unbidden, "Those who speak through the mouth of the cringing mendicant before you are the Bound-together Brotherhood of Colour-mixers and Putters-on of Thought-out designs, bent upon a just cause."

The negotiations rapidly become bad tempered.
"Know then, O battener upon our ill-requited skill, how it has come to our knowledge that one who is not of our Brotherhood moves among us and performs an equal task for less reward."

The language of course is pure invention because in real life Chinese peasants and artisans were, and are, notorious for their swearing and profanity.

This is a poor student speaking:
"The reason" admitted Lao Ting frankly, "need not be buried in a well. Had I avoided the encounter you might have said among yourselves 'Here is one who shuns our gaze. This perchance, is he who of late lurked within the shadow of our backs to bear away our labour'? Not to create this unworthy suspicion I freely came among you, for, as the Ancient Wisdom says, 'do not adjust your sandals while passing through a melon field, nor yet arrange your hat beneath an orange tree'."

This formal type of delivery does not differ markedly from that of a Mandarin:
"The name has a somewhat familiar echo," interrupted the Fountain of Justice, with a genial interest in what was going on, rare in one of his exalted rank. "Have we seen this illconditioned being before?"

Kai Lung can insult his audience with equal elegance.
"In particular, there is among this august crowd of Mandarins one Wang Yu, who has departed on three previous occasions without bestowing the reward of a single cash. If the feeble and covetous-minded Wang Yu will place in this very ordinary bowl the price of one of his exceedingly ill-made pipes, this unworthy person will proceed."

One of the greatest attractions of the stories is the use of aphoristic wit and the rendering of proverbs, many of which are pure invention, expressed in the mannered ornate style that Bramah made his own.

... A few of the maxims that appear throughout the Kai Lung books will give their flavour.

He who lacks a single tael sees many bargains.

When one is enquiring for a way to escape from an advancing tiger, flowers of speech assume the form of noisome bindweed.

Although it is desirable to lose persistently when playing at squares and circles with the broad minded and sagacious Emperor, it is none the less a fact that the observance of this etiquette deprives the intellectual diversion of much of its interest for both players.

It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in low-class teashops.

He who is compelled to share a cavern with a tiger learns to stroke the fur in the right direction.

Before hastening to secure a possible reward of five taels by dragging an unobservant person away from a falling building, examine well his features lest you find, when too late, that it is one to whom you are indebted for double the amount.

It has been said that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night.

When actually in the embrace of a voracious and powerful wild animal, the desirability of leaving a limb is not a matter to be subjected to lengthy consideration.

When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.

In shallow waters dragons become the laughing-stock of shrimps.

It has been truly said that the whole course of an ordinary person's life may be rearranged by so slight a matter as having his gravity displaced at the wrong pause during a speech by a high official.

If to succeed in a business way, sell your sacred books and therewith purchase and display a pretentious banner.

A rock falling outside one's door makes a greater stir than a landslide across the valley.

We think there is nothing so delightful as placing a person of high honourable rank in a ridiculous position.

Extract four

Bramah must have shared the middle classes' trepidation. The result was the socio-science fiction of What Might Have Been and its revision, The Secret of the League. The book chronicles Britain under a Socialist government in 1916, not of the current but some parallel era. They have such a huge majority it is impossible to dislodge them. They do not introduce a full Socialist economy so much as continue to operate capitalism for their own benefit by raising wages, creating a huge army of bureaucrats and taxing the upper and middle classes out of existence. Pinker summed it up. 'It treats of the time which Mr. Keir Hardie prophesied would soon exist, that is, when there will be only two parties in the country, Socialist and anti-Socialists.'

...The manuscript was offered by Pinker to John Murray but his approach was very strange, if not positively mysterious. In submitting the manuscript Pinker claimed that he did not know the author but that he had received it through a client who was a friend of the author who wished to have the book published anonymously. It is extremely unlikely Pinker did not know that the manuscript was the work of Bramah. More intriguing is why Bramah did not want to be identified. John Murray raised no objection to the request for anonymity, nor, it would seem, expressed any curiosity, as to who the author might be, but within two months his identity was known. Murray's editor made some suggestions for changes that Bramah must have resented. John Murray wrote to Bramah directly in December 1906 and apologised. 'I am very sorry if I have caused you unnecessary trouble.I much regret it but please understand that all the suggestions I make are made on the understanding that they are to be rejected without hesitation, if you see fit.'

Nevertheless Murray intended to reduce their financial risk. The financial terms agreed were half of the profit, not a royalty. The book was published early in 1907 with a flourish, at a price of 6/-. At the outset Bramah's prognostication that it might be more popular than the Chinese stories was wrong but in the longer run and for some years he was right. The first edition of 1,525 copies sold poorly. He claimed that he was out of pocket on the first edition on the profitshare basis but that he himself had added considerably to the costs by incessant proof corrections that he said were made to satisfy the publisher.

Very shortly after publication Bramah made the disconcerting discovery that there was another book with the same name by an author, Cashel Hoey, probably as obscure as he was at the time. Her book was priced at 1/-. He was perfectly aware from his editorial activities that there is no copyright in title. Nevertheless, either through an intermediary or directly to Pinker, he asked that this information be passed to John Murray. It was typical of his total honesty that he wanted to send his apologies to Mrs. Hoey and get her permission to retain the title or to change the title in any subsequent reprints. This last course did not arise - there were to be no further impressions with the Murray imprimatur. The book did not sell.

Murray were approached by Nelson to allow them to publish the book in their 7d library. Murray seeking to reduce their losses happily agreed with Nelson that they could publish it using the more commercial title of The Secret of the League. The cheap edition that appeared in 1909 must have undermined any remaining sales of the 6/- edition. John Murray calculated that their share of the royalties on the cheap edition would produce a higher return than the slow sales of whatever stocks they still held. They were right. The Nelson edition was successful and the remaining stock of their own edition was pulped. A further printing from Nelson was issued in 1920 and another edition was issued in 1926. It can be calculated from the royalty statements that some 360,000 copies had been sold. The book was re-issued in America in 1995.

Extract five

There is nothing in the real lives of authors of detective stories that might relate to or explain the type of fiction they write. Indeed the great writers of detective fiction led very ordinary mundane lives and unquestionably a long way from the violent and sordid scenes of their imagination. In a series called Meet the Detectives, Bramah gave one of his only two B.B.C. talks (for which he was paid ten guineas). This was transmitted on the Empire (now World) Service and was not broadcast domestically. In this talk he provided a very positive explanation of how he alighted on the idea of a sightless detective. He attended what he called a 'crook play', which he described as of the type where people drift out of a room about a fifth of a second before the pursuers drift in and where the sleuth turns round to admire a picture on the wall while the confederates pass the jewels. He commented that this action goes on until five minutes before the end of the play then someone suddenly becomes extremely brilliant and then the mystery falls in place.

"If it comes to that" Bramah said, "why not have a blind detective I thought? I mean a really blind one." The incongruity of a man so handicapped taking part in what was generally supposed to be a particularly open-eyed occupation appealed to him. The idea of a man with no blundering self-confident eyes to be hoodwinked and who was flippantly conceived was to become a classic in detective fiction. In Bramah's own words

Max Carrados.is blind, quite blind, but so far from crippling his interests in life or his energies, his blindness has merely impelled him to develop those senses which in most of us lie half dormant and practically unused. Thus you will understand that while he may be at a disadvantage when you are advantaged, he is at an advantage when you are at a disadvantage."

Many years later Henry Green wrote about his character, John Haye, that there were more ways of being blind and more than one way of being able to see. He might have been quoting Carrados. Bramah made Max Carrados wealthy, the legatee of a fortune. He is unmarried so that the tradition of bachelor detectives is not yet broken. He is a round, cultured person with a love of music and sport and his hobby (not surprisingly given Bramah's interest) is coin collecting. After being blinded in a horse riding accident he developed and supertrained his other senses to allow him to do many things as well as, if not better, than sighted people. He can hear a newspaper boy's cry that is inaudible to others; he can read newspapers, in those pre-digital lithography days, through his sense of touch; locate electric light bulbs by their radiation. In one plot his enhanced sense of smell enables him to detect a person wearing a false moustache because of the interaction of perspiration and glue.

Like many other writers of detective fiction Bramah was aware of the seedy reputation of private detectives in real life since most of their commissions were for divorce inquiries which generated salacious press reports. In making Carrados a person of substantial independent means he is able to ignore the cash nexus in selecting the inquiries the detective was prepared to undertake.

Extract six

Few of his masters at the Manchester Grammar School would have foreseen that a pupil with such low-grade examination results would become the visionary, erudite, craftsman and subtle humorist who attracted the admiration of so many literary savants and authors. The boy who came out of school with such an unsatisfactory academic record and did not attend a university acquired an enviable vocabulary. Most people would need recourse to a dictionary to find the meaning of 'cicatrix' 'theurgal' 'paralogism' 'terebinthine' 'tabefaction' 'Eudaemonism'; all of which fit perfectly into the text with no suggestion of an author showing off or patronising his readers.

It is sometimes a problem to separate out Bramah's vivid imagination from the realities of science. His unremarkable performance in chemistry, twenty-second out of forty-five, did not stop him from inventing the fictional 24-pound thorite shell, 'which will grind everything up within 50 yards' and which David Langford wrote; 'sounds nice and thunderous but it would not work since thorite exists but is merely an inert silicate of thorium'. Luck, not prescience, favours Bramah as although it was known in the early nineteenth Century that thorium was the mineral which is naturally radio-active, the use of the destructive power of radioactivity was still well in the future. The plans of a thorite torpedo are at the centre of the plot of 'The Kingsmouth spy case'. Moreover, in 'The war hawks' he also makes the gases generated by its explosive force 'arrest the action of an electrical discharge' thus cutting all wireless communication.

As was described in earlier chapters he successfully prognosticated fax and e-mail communication as well as the incredible anticipation of the Enigma code machine. He foresaw long before the experts, that air supremacy would be critical in war. Bramah's scientific and technical knowledge combined with his imaginative powers led to some predictions remarkable for their closeness to the eventual reality. In a story written about 1907 'The simple law' which looks back from the year 3007 he refers to interatomic action generated by the sun. Solar panels?

...Bramah was a visionary with a fascination for unusual things and his erudition is undoubted. It shines through all his writing. To term him a polymath might be challenged, but the breadth of his knowledge and interests is irrefutable. He was deeply curious about the magical and supernatural but also all that was sanctified by age and custom. Aside from his keen interest in numismatics in which he was an expert, his knowledge extended over a wide range of subjects - law, philosophy, literature, history, Egyptology, astronomy, fossils, philately, the occult and many aspects of science. As the author of the manual on musketry training the list of his interests and knowledge must include at least some aspects of ordnance.