An Englishman's Home

[1] The writer Guy du Maurier was a regular officer in the British Army, who had seen active service during the South African War and who was to be killed in France in 1915.

The home of an ordinary middle-class family is besieged by Nearlander soldiers, and the play climaxes with the father shooting an enemy officer and subsequently being executed.

[6] The play stressed Britain's unpreparedness for attack, and has been credited with boosting recruitment to the Territorial Force in the years immediately before World War I.

[7] It influenced niece Daphne du Maurier's 1952 novelette The Birds,[8] which was made into a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

[7][9] Du Maurier's play was also the basis for the 1940 British drama film of the same name directed by Albert de Courville and starring Edmund Gwenn, Mary Maguire and Paul Henreid.