Рональд Делдерфилд: Жизнь и творчество английского писателя.

British writer

Ronald Frederick Delderfield (12 February 1912 – 24 June 1972) was an English novelist and dramatist, some of whose works have been adapted for television and film.

Ronald Frederick Delderfield was born at 37 Waller Road, New Cross, London, in 1912 to Alice and William James Delderfield (c. 1873–1956). His father worked for a meat wholesaler in Smithfield Market, and was the first Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey Council. William supported women's suffrage and the Boer cause in the Boer War. He was a firm supporter of the temperance movement, and of David Lloyd George until the latter allied himself in government with the Conservative Party. From 1918 to 1923, the family lived at 22 Ashburton Avenue, Addiscombe, near Croydon, Surrey. The Avenue novels were based on Ronald's life in Addiscombe and Shirley Park. Delderfield attended an infant school in Bermondsey, then a "seedy and pretentious" small private school — "seventy boys and four underpaid ushers, presided over by a jovial gentleman who wore blue serge". He then went to a council school, which he hated, but which provided him with the prototype for Mr. Short in The Avenue. This experience was followed by a grammar school whose dedicated teachers inspired several of his characters. Once the family moved to Devon, Delderfield first attended a co educational grammar school and, finally, West Buckland School. In his autobiography For My Own Amusement, Delderfield joked that West Buckland could be likened to schools in The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon, The Avenue and A Horseman Riding By, and that it had earned its fees three times over. In 1950 he featured in a BBC Newsreel clip of the short lived The Axminster and Lyme Regis Clarion in Lyme Regis.

In For My Own Amusement (1972), Delderfield discusses the inspiration for the storylines and tells in anecdotes the origin of several of his characters. He believed that authors draw inspiration from the scenes of their youth, pointing out that Charles Dickens' characters nearly always used the stagecoach, when he was writing in the age of the train. Delderfield calls his sources "character farms", the main ones being his time in Addiscombe, schooldays, and his time at the Exmouth Chronicle. Of The Avenue and A Horseman Riding By he said, "I set out to tell a straightforward story of a group of undistinguished British people—the only kind of people I really know." Delderfield pointed out in this autobiography that he had been criticized for his very conventional views of women's social roles.

Delderfield died at his home, then called Dove Cottage, in Sidmouth of lung cancer, and was survived by his widow, the former May Evans, whom he married in 1936. They had a son and a daughter. A brother, Eric Delderfield (1909–1995) survived him and wrote several books on the history of England's West Country.

Several of Delderfield's historical novels and series involve young men who return from war and take up careers in peacetime that allow the author to delve deeply into social history from the Edwardian era to the early 1960s.

David Powlett Jones of To Serve Them All My Days is from a Welsh working class background and begins his teaching of history at a rural public school shortly after being released from a shell shock ward in 1918. That novel examines the changes in private education and the development of the Labour political movement between the world wars. Adam Swann of the God is an Englishman series is a veteran of the British Army in India who forms a transport business in the mid 19th century. The series explores the economic history of the United Kingdom from the 1860s to the outbreak of the First World War. In the A Horseman Riding By trilogy, Paul Craddock, also an ex soldier, becomes a rural landlord in Delderfield's own Devon in the early 20th century. The two volume work The Avenue, which follows the residents of a middle class suburban road over a few decades, begins shortly after the end of World War I with the return of one resident, who finds that his wife has died in the Spanish flu epidemic and left him with several children to care for.

Delderfield also published non fiction books on Napoleonic history, historical novels involving the Napoleonic Wars, and some isolated novels set in more contemporary periods. His prose style tends to be straightforward and readable, lacking in any influence from post modernist fiction, and his social attitudes are fairly traditional, though his politics, as expressed via his characters, are a mixture of progressive and free market. In general, Delderfield's novels celebrate English history, humanity, and liberalism while demonstrating little patience with entrenched class differences and snobbery yet also sometimes advocating individualism, self reliance, and other traditional Victorian values. Delderfield wrote The Adventures of Ben Gunn (1956) which follows Ben Gunn from sexton's son to pirate and is narrated by Jim Hawkins in Gunn's words. It describes the life of Ben Gunn from the events which led him to leave Devon, and eventually to his presence on Treasure Island and involvement in the story told by Stevenson, and follows up with a brief summary of Ben Gunn's life afterwards.

British TV has made five series based on Delderfield's books. Nigel Havers played Paul Craddock in BBC TV's A Horseman Riding By (1978), adapted from the eponymous novel. John Duttine played David Powlett Jones in BBC TV's To Serve Them All My Days (1980), adapted by Andrew Davies from the eponymous novel and Archie Carver in London Weekend Television's People Like Us (1977), adapted from the Avenue novels. Diana was adapted in 1984 into a BBC miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove in the title role and Patsy Kensit as her younger self. Come Home Charlie, and Face Them was adapted as a mini series by London Weekend Television in 1990. The first Carry On film, Carry On Sergeant (1958), was based on Delderfield's play The Bull Boys. A 1961 film On the Fiddle starring Sean Connery was based on Delderfield's novel Stop at a Winner. His play Worm's Eye View was filmed with Diana Dors under its original title. The 1956 film Now and Forever was based on his play The Orchard Walls.