Author: H Rider Haggard
HENRY RIDER HAGGARD was born on 22nd June, 1856 at Wood Farm on Bradenham Hall estate, Norfolk. Rider was the eighth child. He grew up in the healthy atmosphere of a happy and secure home presided over by a benevolent tyrant of a father - the typical squire of the old kind - and a gentle, gifted mother. He received his first schooling at day schools and subsequently privately with the rector of Garsington near Oxford. After this - unlike his elder brothers who went to Public Schools - he had to content himself with a Grammar School education (at Ipswich) which was not completed because his father, with characteristic suddenness, decided that he should take up a diplomatic career. Accordingly he was sent to London, where, first privately and then at a crammers' establishment, he prepared himself for the Foreign Office Examination. The two years he spent in London, free of all parental control, at an age when most young men of his class were normally at university, first taught him to cope with life in the same effective, if rough, manner in which - as he put it in his autobiography - he had been taught to swim - when, as a small boy, one of his brothers had thrown him into the Rhine. Also during those years he made contact with people interested in the study of psychical phenomena, an interest which remained with him all his life, he himself being endowed, it seemed, with extrasensory faculties of experience. He did not take his Foreign Office examination; instead, in 1875 at his father's instigation, he was given a post on the staff of Sir Henry Bulwer, the newly appointed Governor of Natal. Eighteen months in that colony - in a position which seems to have been that of a junior secretary and general handy-man to the Governor - gave him the opportunity of acquainting himself fully with the history and customs of the Zulus and other African peoples, an invaluable experience in view of the events which were to follow and the duties he was subsequently called upon to perform. In 1876 he was transferred to the staff of the Special Commissioner for the Transvaal, and took part in the historic Mission which resulted in the annexation of that territory by Britain in April, 1877. Soon after the Annexation he was appointed Master and Registrar of the High Court at Pretoria, a post which he held successfully for two years. He resigned in 1879 and returned to England because events which had taken place in South Africa during his tenure of office seemed to preclude the possibility of a permanent career in the Colonial Service. The Zulu War had broken out and quickly brought a series of costly and humiliating defeats. The ensuing political vacuum and the vacillations of British policy led to the Boer Rebellion and the eventual retrocession of the Transvaal in 1881, events which deeply affected Rider Haggard, who was a firm believer in England's Imperial Mission and Destiny. In 1885 he was called to the Bar and, for a while, practised in the Probate and Divorce Court. His first great success as an author came with the publication of King Solomon's Mines (1885), the first in the long list of his romances, each of which was eagerly awaited by countless thousands of readers. In 1912 he was knighted and appointed to the Dominions Royal Commission which was to tour the Empire and examine Colonial trade. He visited Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, from where he returned to England soon after the outbreak of World War I. In 1916 he again made an extensive tour of the Overseas Dominions, this time as honorary representative of the Royal Colonial Institute to examine conditions for the proposed settlement of ex-Service men. In acknowledgement of his services he was nominated honorary life member of the Royal Colonial Institute. In 1919 he was made a Knight of the British Empire. He also held a number of other offices such as that of Chairman of the Norfolk and Suffolk bench of Magistrates and of Chairman of Committee of the Society of Authors. He was ailing during the last years of his life and died after an operation on May 14th, 1925 in London.
