[1] The son of Robert Davenport (known as "Robin" or "Arthur"),[2] a self-described "dramatic author", writer and illustrator of children's stories, and writer of lyrics for popular songs (including as a collaborator with H. G. Pelissier on an adaptation of The Follies) and the actress Muriel George (who later married the actor Ernest Butcher), Davenport was primarily raised at Barons Court by his grandmother, and subsequently educated at St Paul's and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at which latter he opted to study rather than taking up a history scholarship he had won to Hertford College, Oxford.
He taught at Stowe School in the 1940s, and worked for the BBC at Bush House as Head of the Belgian Section (he spoke fluent French, having lived there for some time)[9] He was a close friend of Dylan Thomas, with whom, in 1941, he wrote The Death of the King's Canary, a satirical detective novel (it remained unpublished until 1976).
Although Davenport finally admitted to Empson in 1952 that he thought he had left the manuscript in a taxi, in fact he had given it to the Tamil poet, Tambimuttu, and it eventually made its way to publication many years later.
[12] One anecdote (related slightly differently by Paul Johnson and Nora Sayre)[13][1] has him, whilst at either the Savage Club or the Savile Club, hoisting a man (per Johnson, Lord Maugham, the Lord Chancellor and brother of the author Somerset Maugham; per Sayre, a bishop) six feet into the air and depositing him upon a mantelpiece, from which descent proved complicated.
In contrast to this bellicose approach, Davenport was considered "one of the most remarkable and talented men of his generation", with an "appreciation of literature ... equalled only by his insight into the wearisome condition of humanity" and "exhilarating" wit.