He wrote one of the most quintessentially English books, yet Kenneth Grahame (1859 -1932) was a Scot. He was four years old when his mother died and his father became an alcoholic, so Kenneth grew up with his grandmother who lived on the banks of the beloved River Thames. Forced to abandon his dreams of studying at Oxford, he was accepted as a clerk at the Bank of England where he became one of the youngest men to be made company secretary. He narrowly escaped death in 1903 when he was mistaken for the Bank’s governor and shot at several times. He wrote secretly in his spare time for magazines and became a contemporary of contributors including Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and WB Yeats. Kenneth’s first book, Pagan Papers (1893) initiated his success, followed by The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), which turned him into a celebrated author. Ironically, his most famous novel today was the least successful during his lifetime: The Wind in the Willows (1908) originated as letters to his disabled son, who was later found dead on a train line after a suspected suicide. Kenneth never recovered from the tragedy and died with a broken heart in earshot of the River Thames. His widow, Elspeth, dedicated the rest of her life to preserving her husband’s name and promoting his work. AUTHOR: It was when she was swimming in the River Thames between Henley and Marlow on a beautiful English summer’s morning that Elisabeth Galvin had the idea of a biography on Kenneth Grahame. As a young child Elisabeth grew up in Bray, Berkshire, along the river from where Kenneth Grahame lived and wrote. She read English and Classics at Durham University, and has lived (and swum) in four countries including Australia, Hong Kong and the United States. Returning home, the first place she found herself was by the River Thames at Richmond.
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