Jerome K Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat, was born on this date in 1859. Here are some things you might not know abut him.
The K stands for Klapka, in part after the exiled Hungarian general György Klapka, but also a variation of the name his parents gave him which was Jerome Clapp Jerome, after his father. His father, an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture, was originally called simply Jerome Clap, but he changed it.
Jerome K Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, England. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and a brother, Milton, who died at an early age.
He went to grammar school, and may well have gone on to a career in politics or academia had his father not died when he was 13, and his mother 2 years later, which meant he had to leave school and work to support himself. His first job was with London and North Western Railway, collecting Coal which had fallen off the trains. He did this for four years.
His sister, Blandina, was a big fan of the theatre and this inspired the young Jerome to try acting. Using the stage name of Harold Crichton, he joined a repertory theatre troupe that produced plays on a shoestring budget, but after 3 years with little success, he decided that acting was not for him and left, at the age of 21.
Over the next few years, he worked a school teacher, a packer, and a solicitor's clerk, although he was also trying to establish a writing career, but most of his submissions were rejected. That is, until he wrote On the Stage — and Off in 1885, a comic memoir of his experiences with the acting troupe, which enjoyed modest success.
In 1888, Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris, who had divorced her first husband just nine days before their wedding. The couple spent their honeymoon on a boat on the Thames, which provided the inspiration for Jerome’s best known book, Three Men in a Boat. In the book, he travelled with his friends George Wingrave (George) and Carl Hentschel (Harris), rather than with his wife. This book has never been out of print, and inspired many people to try boating on the Thames for themselves: the number of registered Thames boats went up by fifty per cent in the year following its publication.
He wrote a sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, in which the same characters go on a cycling holiday in Europe. It wasn’t as successful but some of the comic vignettes in it are regarded as highly as the ones in Three Men in a Boat.
He was a friend of HG Wells, and together they invented a board game called Little Wars. Wells wrote the rule book. The game involved setting up a battlefield with toy soldiers, wooden blocks, scenery to scale, and toy cannons capable of firing and knocking the toy soldiers over. The object of the game was to wipe out your opponent by knocking down his soldiers or forcing him to surrender. The game was invented in 1913, just a year before WWI began. Hence there was a similar furore about it as there was with Dungeons and Dragons 70 or so years later, with some journalists suggesting that Little Wars had actually triggered the Great War.
Jerome wanted to serve in said war, but by this time he was over 50 and so the army didn’t want him. Instead, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French Army.
He has inspired other writers. He is the protagonist in series of French graphic novels published in 1982, and Three Men in a Boat is behind the title of a time travel novel by Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is the subtitle of Three Men in a Boat. Also, British Rail named a Class 31 diesel locomotives after him in 1990 at Bescot.
Beta
(Combat Team Series #2)
Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?
Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.
Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream.
Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.
Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.
Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.
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