Gilbert Frankau

After education at Eton College, he went into the family cigar business and became managing director on his twenty-first birthday, his father, Arthur Frankau, having died in November 1904.

[3] He went to the Western Front as a brigade adjutant and fought in major battles of the British Expeditionary Force – Loos, Ypres and the Somme in France and Belgium[3] – and wrote for the Wipers Times.

His novels, while having conventional romantic content, also contained material from his own conservative politics and meditations on Jewish identity in the climate of the times.

[8] After he had been unceremoniously removed from his post, Time gleefully reported:[9] "Twirling his glass of sherry, Gilbert 'Swankau' Frankau alibied: "'As the founder of Britannia [sip], I said what I thought, without fear or favour.

He was 'agin' the Government of Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, 'agin' the David Lloyd George Liberals, 'agin' the Ramsay MacDonald Laborites..." In the aftermath of this disappointment, Gilbert Frankau – according to his own account – approached a Conservative politician he "knew to be rather close to Stanley Baldwin", offering to stand for Parliament at his own expense in the forthcoming General Election, but was advised: "'I'd better be frank with you.

In fact, this particular piece was more balanced than the headline now appears: "Time alone will tell whether the little Austrian with the Charlie Chaplin moustache is a mere spellbinder or a statesman", comments Frankau, ending with the poignant question, "who are we, the great expounders of democracy, and how are we, already disarmed to the point of national danger, to interfere?"

His autobiography, completed in August 1939,[12] includes emphatically anti-German comments, such as: "The Pomper of Potsdam looked all of a warlord, even if he did bolt to Doorn like a rabbit.

[3] He was awarded permanent disability retired pay in 1944,[14] in the meantime having served in the 14th (Home Guard) Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment from 1942.

[citation needed] His mother, Julia Frankau (1859–1916), sister of Mrs Aria and Owen Hall, wrote under the name Frank Danby (and is said to have collaborated with George Moore[15]).