Edward Harold Begbie

Edward Harold Begbie (1871-1929) was an English author and journalist who published nearly 50 books, poems and contributed to periodicals.

At first Begbie took up farming, but later moved to London and joined the "Daily Chronicle" and later the "Globe". He wrote books of popular verse, and much literature for children. At the outbreak of World War I he wrote a number of recruiting poems and visited America on behalf of his paper. Some of the articles he wrote there were used as propaganda. By 1916, dismayed by the attacks being made on Lord Haldane by L.J. Maxse in the National Review, he began to question the Government's domestic policy. In 1917, he publicly defended the rights of Pacifists and Conscientious Objectors to oppose the War. He later wrote his best known work under the pseudonym of "A Gentleman with a Duster", in which various anomalies and injustices were exposed. Among his other works, the best known were "Broken Earthware", "Other Sheep", "In the Hands of the Potter", and his "Life of General Booth".

References

*MW 1935|date=August 2008