Ernest Bramah

Hulme, England, 1868 - 1942

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50014273
found: Twentieth cent. authors (incl. suppl.) (Smith, Ernest Bramah; "Ernest Bramah"; 1869?-June 27, 1942; was such a private person that year of birth is unknown; when he died in 1942 his age was generally given as 73)

Smith, Ernest Brammah [pseud. Ernest Bramah] (1868–1942), writer, was born on 20 March 1868 at 1 Rushton Street, Hulme, Manchester, the son of Charles Clement Smith, a Manchester warehouseman, and his wife, Susannah Brammah. He left school in Manchester to go into training as a farmer at Erith, Kent, but, after two years' training and five years' practice, eventually decided that he had no future in farming. He later explained his reasons in English Farming, and Why I Turned it Up (1894), in the preface to which he wrote: ‘I can remember the time when people used to talk to me about farming and explain how I ought to go about it. Alas! I now know.’ This, like all his other books, was written under the pseudonym Ernest Bramah and gave no clues to his personal life. Throughout his career Smith was extremely reticent about his personal affairs and shunned publicity. He once wrote: ‘I am not fond of writing about myself and only to a less degree about my work.’ Who Was Who gives only his pen-name, a list of his works, and his death date.

His farming having failed, Smith decided to try journalism and, after a brief period as correspondent on a provincial newspaper, he went to London to work as secretary to Jerome K. Jerome. He then joined the staff of Jerome's paper Today, a twopenny weekly, which was founded in 1893 and folded in 1897.

The name of Ernest Bramah first came to public notice with The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900), the first of his collection of stories told by a wandering Chinese man in the manner of the Arabian Nights tales and in an elaborate Mandarin style ostensibly of Chinese translated into flowery English language. Hilaire Belloc, one of his most persistent champions, wrote: ‘These parable-like tales obtain their effect of subtle humour and philosophy by the adaptation of Chinese conventions to the English tongue.’ Other Kai Lung books include Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922), Kai Lung Unrolls his Mat (1928), The Moon of much Gladness (1932), and Kai Lung beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940). Smith's creation captured the public imagination to the extent that the Kai-Lung Club was founded in London to celebrate the novels.

In 1914 Smith began an entirely different set of stories with Max Carrados, the eponymous hero of which, on the dust jacket of the first edition, is described as ‘a detective of a totally new and unexpected type, for he is blind; but the alluring peculiarity of his case is that his blindness is more than counterbalanced by an enormously enhanced perception of the other senses’. Further books in this series include The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923) and Max Carrados Mysteries (1927).

The Specimen Case (1924) contains stories of both Kai Lung and Max Carrados, the main reason for which Smith, emerging from his usual seclusion, explains in the preface. In consequence of the marked contrast between the styles of the two series, some critics had questioned how such stories could all be the work of one author. Grant Richards enquired in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Is there really such a person as Ernest Bramah?’ and Rose Macaulay wrote in the Nation and Athenaeum, ‘The crude stilted Conan Doylish English of the detective stories certainly goes far to bear out the common theory that Ernest Bramah has a literary dual personality’. ‘There is one retort still left’, wrote Smith, ‘whereby to confound the non-existence and the dualists alike—I can produce both a Kai Lung and a Max Carrados between one pair of covers—and here they are.’

As a hobby Smith studied numismatics and published A guide to the varieties and rarity of English regal copper coins—Charles II, 1671, to Victoria, 1860 (1929). He died at 40 Boulevard, Weston-super-Mare, his home in Somerset, on 23 June 1942. His wife, Maisie, survived him.

H. F. Oxbury, rev.
Sources

H. Haycraft, Murder for pleasure: the life and times of the detective story (1941) · The Times (29 June 1942) · S. P. B. Mais, Some modern authors (1923) · Location register of twentieth-century English literary manuscripts and letters, BL, 1 (1988) · S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds., Twentieth century authors: a biographical dictionary of modern literature (1942) · d. cert.
Archives

Ransom HRC · U. Reading · University of Bristol

Likenesses

photograph, repro. in Haycraft, Murder for pleasure, facing p. 82
Wealth at death

£15,172 13s. 9d.: probate, 1943
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

H. F. Oxbury, ‘Smith, Ernest Brammah (1868–1942)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/37217, accessed 5 Oct 2017]

Ernest Brammah Smith (1868–1942): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37217

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Last Updated8/7/24

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