He was a son of physician Harald Mathias "Mads" Gram (1875–1929) and art historian Irma Ingertha Schram (1873–1945).
[5] He finished his secondary education in 1928 and Oslo Commerce School in 1929, and graduated from the Royal Frederick University with the cand.jur.
He was a junior solicitor in Oslo from 1935 to 1936, law clerk in London from 1936 to 1939 and then secretary in the Nordisk Defence Club from 1939.
He issued the scholarly books Fraktavtaler og deres tolkning in 1948 and Sjølovene på engelsk in 1950.
However his main work was still as the secretary in the Nordisk Defence Club, where he was promoted to assisting director in 1958 and chief executive officer in 1960.