RF Delderfield (re posted)

Ronald F Delderfield, author and playwright, was born in Bermondsey in London, in 1912. His father worked for a meat trader in Smithfield Meat Market, and then became involved in local politics, being the first Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey council. His father supported the Liberals, and Ronald also was mildly liberal in his political views. In 1918 the family moved to suburban Croydon, were they lived until 1923, when they moved out of London, to Devon. His father was able to get him into a small public school, West Buckland, where he got a good education and which became the model for Bamfylde School in his novel “To Serve them All my Days”. 
His father and a friend bought a small local newspaper, in Exmouth, and used it to support their political views... and to cover the local news. 
Many of Delderfield’s novels are based on his real life experiences. His two “Avenue” novels, which are set in Croydon, from World War I to World War II, are based on his childhood in that area. Jim Carver, hero of the novels, is a working man, who gets into Labour politics after seeing the horrors of World War I… He works as a driver for a big company, but devotes most of his free time to trying to “improve the world” and his political views shift as the 20s and 30s progress. He becomes friends with Harold Godbeer, who is a middle class man and more of a Tory, who works as a managing clerk in a firm of solicitors. Harold admires Jim for his war service and his work in the ARP in World War II, and Jim takes on some of Harold’s more conservative common sense views. 
In his novel Diana, Delderfield uses his own and his father’s experiences as working at a local small-scale newspaper. John Leigh, from a poor family, takes a job as reporter for a small paper, in Devon, while being in love with the rich and spoiled “Bright young Thing” Diana. 
Delderfield moved from newspaper work to writing a play, in 1936. He began to have some success, (like Esme Fraser in the Avenue novels) and then went into the RAF for his war service. After the War, he settled in Devon and went on with his writing career. He married and adopted two children. He enjoyed country life, and many of his characters give up town life and move to the country, particularly to Devon, and take up farming. He started to write novels in the 1950s, and wrote many different sorts of books. However, in all his writing, he was conservative in his story telling, he was not into “fine writing” or experimental fiction. In the 50s, he wrote the 2 Avenue stories, which follow the fortunes of several people who live in the Avenue, mostly working or lower middle class people. Archie Carver, the son of Jim, makes a modest fortune in running shops but causes a death through drunken driving and ends up in prison. He feels guilty about this and then takes up property development, after the War and his prison term and he and his father reconcile. 
Esme, the young “hero” of the books, tries his hand at writing, but goes into the RAF, and then buys a farm in Devon, after marrying Jim’s daughter Judith. 
He also wrote some novels based on the Napoleonic Wars, and several nonfiction books about Napoleon, his family and his Marshals. In the 1960’s he wrote two novels about the love affair of John Leigh and the wealthy Diana... which were combined later into one novel and titled “Diana”. he wrote two historical “family sagas”, one based on a Victorian soldier, Adam Swann, who comes out of the army and goes into business, transporting goods, in places where the railways had not yet reached. Adam has a large family who take up various different jobs, and Delderfield can cover the history and social changes of the Victorian and Edwardian era. His eldest son, Alexander, becomes an officer in the Victorian army. His son Giles becomes a social reformer and later an MP. Another son, George is interested in mechanical things and develops a motor car and looks towards motorising his father’s business. 
His next saga, “the Valley” story, is set in Devon, and covers the life of Paul Craddock, who is a wealthy young man whose father made a fortune in business. On leaving the army after the Boer War, Paul turns his back on city and business life and decides to buy up a large estate in the West Country and modernise it. He is also liberal minded and tries to improve life for his tenants and supports various reformist causes. His first wife, Grace, leaves him because she is much more radical than he is... she is a passionate believer in Women’s Suffrage, and she devotes her life to working for the cause until she is killed in World War I.
 Again Delderfield uses his hero’s life to cover the social history of the 20th Century, from the beginning of the century, to the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965. His second wife, Clare, is a simpler earthy girl, a farmer’s daughter, who Is not intellectual and is contented with a life as “the Squire’s wife” in the Shallowford Estate. Paul has seven children, who go into different areas of work, but generally Delderfield's most sympathetic characters tend to opt for  less ambitious jobs like teaching, running a small business, or farming and don’t aspire to high flying careers or making a lot of money in business.  He was not hostile to business, but to an extent, he was critical of "Big Business."  He himself ran a small antique business in later years, and one of his Avenue characters, Edgar Frith is also in this business. 
I’ve always enjoyed Delderfield’s unpretentious prose, and his long readable works and “ordinary” likable characters. 
He died in 1972. Many of his books have been televised by the BBC, during the years when they did “good” costume dramas. These include “Diana”, “To Serve them All my Days”, the Avenue books and the “Valley Saga..