Harry Graham

“Don’t hide a hedgehog in his hat.”

*

Introduction. In Benefit of Clergy – Some notes on Salvador Dali, (withdrawn from the Saturday Review, 1944, published in the 1946 edition of his Essays) George Orwell reflects on Dali’s attraction to the Edwardian, what he calls “the old-fashioned, over-ornate, Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to return”. Orwell had seen it in illustrations of Anatole France, of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, in the works of James Branch Cabell, and what he goes on to call “the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends.” Finally, Orwell was able to link the spirit of Dali’s world with something older:

When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was it? Of course! Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes by Harry Graham. Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912*, and one that ran:
Poor little Willy is crying so sore,
A sad little boy is he,
For he’s broken his little sister’s neck
And he’ll have no jam for tea.
might almost have been founded on Dali’s anecdote.

The intended audience for Orwell’s article about Dali would have heard of Harry Graham. The situation is different today and here I look at the life of this remarkable man.

Family Background. Jocelyn Henry Clive (Harry) Graham was born on 23 December 1874 in London according to his Times obituary, the Dictionary of National Biography and the 1911 census. According to an Ancestry Tree he was born in Renfrewshire in Scotland which might be why I could not find an Ancestry index reference to his birth in London; but I have not found any entry for his birth in Scottish records either. He was baptised at St Paul’s Anglican Church, Knightsbridge, London, on 4 February 1875.

Harry Graham’s father Sir Henry John Lowndes Graham was born in Glasgow on 15 January 1842, studied at Harrow, became a barrister and rose to be Clerk of the Parliaments i.e. he was in charge of the administration of the Houses of Parliament. He was a humourist a vital asset in that job then as now. In 1890 Boosey & Co. of London, a leading music publisher, published his Six Drawing Room Ditties a collection of comic verse. He died in London on 6 December 1930 aged eighty eight.

Early Life. Graham was initially raised by his father alone who he called the most perfect father; went to Eton In 1888 where he was in Charles Hugh Everard’s house; studied at Sandhurst; joined the Coldstream Guards as a Second Lieutenant in 1895; and was promoted first Lieutenant in 1898.

From 1898 to 1904 Graham was an Aide de Camp to Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the 4th Earl of Minto, the Governor General of Canada. Lieutenant Graham took a break to serve in the Boer War and was promoted Captain. From 1904 to 1906 he was Private Secretary to Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery the 5th Earl of Rosebery a former Liberal Prime Minister.

Edward Arnold a London publisher published Graham’s first published work Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes in 1899. His pseudonym, Col. D. Streamer, was a reference to his regiment. A typical verse read:

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell –
We must buy a filter.

Little Miss Nobody followed in 1901. This was a musical comedy for which he wrote the words. Then came Ballads of the Boer War in (1902) a bitter look at a brutal war from the alleged viewpoint of a British Army sergeant. Later that year came A Baby’s Baedeker (Baedeker is a German travel guide). It satirised various countries. Its poem about Turkey would be found offensive in Turkey and Armenia. Perverted Proverbs followed in 1903,

In 1904 Harry Graham’s Misrepresentative Men was published. One poem satirised the American Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Lord and Lady Minto had liked Graham’s sense of humour and his writing, producing and starring in musical comedies. Satirising an American President was different. This is why Minto and Graham parted company in 1904.

In 1905 Graham, a Liberal, had published Fiscal Ballads, More Misrepresentative Men, and Verse and Worse. One of the More Misrepresentative Men satirised Judge Alton Brooks Parker who had run as a Democrat against Theodore Roosevelt in the 1904 American presidential election.

Graham became a full time professional writer in 1906. He was briefly engaged to the American actress Ethel Barrymore but on 8 February 1910, aged thirty five, married a widow Dorothy Keith Fraser nee Villiers aged thirty, from a old established naval family. Their one child, Virginia Margaret Graham, was born on 1 November 1910. She became a writer, critic and comic poet. She died in 1993 aged eighty two.

Later life. Harry Graham continued writing comic verse, lyrics for musical comedies, play-scripts, and comic prose. He tried serious writing but this was difficult as he had become typecast. His comic verse included Departmental Ditties (1909) which should not be confused with Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, Lord Bellinger an Autobiography (1909), and More Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1930). Musical comedies he co-authored included The Maid of the Mountains (1917), The Lady of the Rose (1921), and Betty in Mayfair (1934).

The plays Graham co-authored included A Little Dutch Girl (1920), Toni (1924), Katja the Dancer (1925), The White Horse Inn (1931) and Viktoria and her Hussar (1931). White Horse Inn was a translation of a German romantic comedy as were some of the other works for which Graham produced lyrics.

Harry Graham’s most notable serious book was Splendid Failures (Edward Arnold, 1913) about Wolfe Tone the Irish Nationalist; Toussaint L’Ouverture the Haitian revolutionary; Charles Townshend a brilliant orator whose stupidity as Chancellor of the Exchequer helped cause the American War of Independence; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s oldest son Hartley Coleridge; the painter Benjamin Haydon; George Smythe a politician ruined in a sex scandal, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico; and the child prodigy actor William Betty..

The First World War. Graham re-joined the Coldstream Guards in 1914. He served in France with the 40th and 5th Infantry Divisions. According to his Times obituary “his active service in France when over 40 left an indelible mark on his none too sound constitution”. He died of cancer of the oesophagus on 30 October 1936 aged sixty one, at his 5 Montague Square, Marylebone, London, residence.

Reputation. On 31 October 1936 the Times gave Harry Graham a long obituary which included a testimonial from his friend Lieutenant Colonel Charles Pascoe Hawkes of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers; and a Times leading article discussed Graham’s life and work. A follow up article by another friend appeared in it on Monday 2 November 1936. Harry Graham was given an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Some of Harry Graham’s works, notably Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, are still in print but he himself has largely been forgotten. The September 1964 London Magazine contained an article about him by Gavin Ewart, a poet well-known for his own cynicism. In 1984 Methuen of Toronto, Canada, published Across Canada to the Klondyke: being the journal of a ten thousand mile tour through the “Great North West” July 19th-October 13th, 1900. The introduction to this account of his journey as Secretary to Lord Minto discussed his life.

A Final Note. George Orwell may have kept up with Graham’s work after Ruthless Rhymes, for his only other reference to him, made about a year later, puts him in a wider context:

English light verse in the present century—witness the work of Owen Seaman, Harry Graham, A. P. Herbert, A. A. Milne and others—has mostly been poor stuff, lacking not only in fancifulness but in intellectuality. Its authors are too anxious not to be highbrows—even, though they are writing in verse, not to be poets.

Harry Graham’s poem “The Stern Parent” in Ruthless Rhymes (1901 in the American edition) reads:

Father heard his Children scream,
So he threw them in the stream
Saying, as he drowned the third,
“Children should be seen, not heard!”

Would any major publisher dare publish such a poem today? At least, neither Graham nor Orwell have left us any record of their behaving in such a fashion.

* Ruthless Rhymes was published in the UK in 1899, and in the USA in 1901. Orwell, it seems, was not alone in returning to Harry Graham in the 1940s – the copy scanned from Harvard University Library on archive.org shows that it was acquired there in 1940.