Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame (born in Edinburgh in 1859, died in Pangbourne in 1932) was a British writer who spent almost thirty years working at the Bank of England. He is remembered above all for The Wind in the Willows, a children's classic published at the end of the Victorian era that is still read by children and adults alike.

After his mother died of scarlet fever in 1864 and his father could no longer look after the children, Grahame spent much of his childhood with his grandmother at Cranbourne, near the Thames in Berkshire. He was a boarder at St Edward's School in Oxford, where he excelled both academically and at sport. He hoped to go to university, but his uncle, who would have paid for it, refused, so in 1879 he took a clerk's post at the Bank of England. He rose to become its Secretary, one of its three most senior officers, at the age of thirty-nine.

He was writing at the same time. Around 1888 he began publishing stories and essays in London periodicals and, encouraged by the poet William Ernest Henley, collected them as Pagan Papers (1893). The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) followed, with tales of four children raised by aunts and uncles, written with a wry but tender tone. He married Elspeth Thomson in 1899, a marriage that was not a happy one, and their only child, Alastair, was born with problems of sight and health.

The years from 1903 to 1908 brought hardship. In 1903 a man fired three shots at him inside the Bank and missed each time, an incident that probably contributed to his early retirement in 1908, officially on grounds of ill health. The stories he told his son about a mole, a beaver, a water-rat and a toad lie behind The Wind in the Willows, published that same year. Grahame never wrote a sequel, although other authors later continued the book after his death.

He died in Pangbourne in 1932 and was buried in Oxford. His lasting contribution was to show that children's literature can be carefully written prose, with landscape, humour and characters familiar to readers of any age. Later adaptations, including Disney's film version, have kept the book in the public eye.