J. E. Harold Terry

Joseph Edward Harold Terry (1885–1939) was an English novelist, playwright, actor and critic who was born in York.

[1] and became famous for writing two of the longest running plays of the First World War era, The Man Who Stayed at Home (1914) and General Post (1917), which both ran for more than 500 performances.

[7] Terry took a number of amateur acting roles in the years after leaving Cambridge,[8] most notably playing King Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in the York Historic Pageant of 1909, a production that he had helped Louis N. Parker to write.

[1] The Yorkshire Herald then commissioned Terry to write a serial story for the newspaper which was in 1912 published as the novel A Fool to Fame.

[9] Although this historical romance about the highwayman John Nevison received positive reviews[8][10] he would become best known for his patriotic wartime plays that emphasised the resourcefulness and courage of ordinary civilians and the impact of war on social conventions.

[18] These were followed by a film version of Terry's play General Post (1920)[18] the stage version of which ran from March 1917[22] for 586 performances at the Haymarket Theatre[23] and earned Terry commendation for being one of the first war dramatists to explore the social impact of war and the breakdown of class divisions,[24] pre-empting the exploration of these themes in John Galsworthy's The Foundations (1917)[22][25] Following on from his earlier work with Worrall, they wrote a sequel to The Man Who... in 1917, called The Man Who Went Abroad, although this proved to be less successful than the original.