Samuel Levy Bensusan (29 September 1872 – 11 December 1958)[1] was a British author, musician, traveller, playwright, recorder of declining Essex dialects, and expert on country matters.
He was horrified at the harsh sentences imposed by the courts (a sensivity which he later expressed in a horror of cruelty to animals), and left the law to pursue a writing career.
Near neighbours also included H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and R. D. Blumenfeld (editor of the Daily Express) and Gustav Holst who lived for a time at Thaxted and developed an interest in folksong there.
Bensusan was in contact, not only with these luminaries, but many others as is evident in letters to people such as Rudyard Kipling, Adrian Bell, Sidney Olivier and others who had an interest in land use, agriculture and country issues.
[16] Bensusan developed an interest in recording the local East Anglian dialects and incorporated such diction in some of the plays and novels he wrote, for example, Joan Winter (1933), Right Forward Folk (1949) and Marshland Voices (1955).
[citation needed] Bensusan died in St Leonards-on-Sea [Hastings] in 1958, after a long illness;[17][18] Marian survived him by six years.