R. H. Mottram
R. H. Mottram, born Ralph Hale Mottram on October 30, 1883, in Norwich, England, emerged from an upper-class background and initially pursued a career in banking. However, under the influence of notable authors like Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy, he shifted his focus to writing. His early attempts at poetry under the pseudonym J. Marjoram did not achieve significant recognition, leading him to return to banking until World War I shifted his trajectory. Serving as a junior officer during the war, Mottram's harrowing experiences influenced his literary work, particularly his acclaimed trilogy centered around a farm in northern France, which explores the psychological impact of war on individuals and society.
The trilogy begins with "The Spanish Farm," which gained him the Hawthorden Prize and features complex characters like the French peasant Madeleine and British soldiers grappling with the realities of conflict. Mottram's writing, characterized by a direct style and a focus on the resilience of the British character, helped him build a substantial body of work, including novels, travelogues, and biographies, throughout his career. Although he achieved financial stability and some popularity, his later works did not receive the same critical acclaim as his trilogy. Mottram passed away on April 15, 1971, leaving behind a legacy as a significant observer of British life affected by war and socioeconomic challenges.
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R. H. Mottram
- Born: October 30, 1883
- Birthplace: Norwich, Norfolk, England
- Died: April 15, 1971
- Place of death: King's Lynn, Norfolk, England
Biography
Ralph Hale Mottram was born into upper-class comfort, the son of a third generation banker, on October 30, 1883, in Norwich, northeast of London near the North Sea coast. Part of a long- established Norwich family, Mottram was raised to be conscious of that social status. Educated locally, Mottram was a voracious reader, particularly the novels of Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy. Mottram met the latter just shy of his twentieth birthday when Galsworthy had already established a minor reputation as a chronicler of the upper-middle class (he would achieve international success and earn the 1932 Nobel Prize).
Mottram had accepted a position at his family’s bank, but Galsworthy persuaded him to pursue writing. Mottram published two slender volumes of largely derivative, and forgettable, romantic verse under the pseudonym J. Marjoram in the late 1910’s. Discouraged, he continued his banking career until the advent of World War I, when he served as a junior officer and came to know first hand the horrific realities of warfare and the pointless sacrifices made in the name of empty patriotism.
When he returned to England, he used his war experiences to craft his defining achievement: a trilogy of books set around a farm in northern France, originally built by the Spanish. Like the novels of his mentor Galsworthy, Mottram’s novels are threaded by common characters. The novels examine not only the psychology of characters under enormous pressure but make larger statements about the characters as representative British types tested by historic circumstances. The Spanish Farm, the first and most successful volume of the trilogy (it received the coveted Hawthorden Prize as that year’s best work of imaginative literature by a young writer), introduces a hardworking French peasant named Madeleine, who maintains her father’s farm in Flanders even as regiments of Allied troops billet there. She becomes disastrously involved with a young romantic British soldier deeply disillusioned by the horrors of the war. That soldier commands the narrative center of the second volume, Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!. The third volume, The Crime at Vanderlyndens, features a second British soldier who must confront Madeleine over a controversial damage claim she files against the troops quartered on her farm. The trilogy earned Mottram an international reputation for its direct and undecorated style, its frank treatment of characters caught up in war, and its affirmation of the strength and durability of the British character. Secure financially, Mottram resigned his banking position and earned a living from his writing, for more than three decades publishing novels, travelogues, memoirs, and biographies at a rate of nearly one title every other year. Although the titles sold well enough, Mottram never earned the critical praise his trilogy secured, enhanced when it was serialized by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the late 1960’s.
When he died on April 15, 1971, Mottram was remembered as a prolific chronicler of twentieth century British character tested by the experience of war and economic hardship, the creator of a formidable array of highly readable novels, formally conservative, that collectively affirm a humanitarian morality.