Frank Norman was a British novelist and playwright.
19 Facts About Frank Norman
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Frank Norman's reputation rests on his first memoir, Bang to Rights, and his musical play Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, but much of the remainder of his work remains fresh and readable.
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Jeffrey Bernard in an obituary of Norman wrote that he was.
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Frank Norman was born in Bristol, England, in 1930 and was abandoned by his natural parents.
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John Frank Norman was not born within the sound of Bow Bells so was not a true Cockney sparrow.
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Frank Norman was born on 9 June 1930, the illegitimate son of Frank Charles Booth and Beatrice Smith Nee Norman, a secretary who worked at the engineering works owned by Frank Smith's father.
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Frank Norman was then moved to Cardington Abbey Howard House 17 Cardington Road, Bedford on 3 April 1937.
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Frank Norman then requested a transfer to the gardening department.
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Frank Norman left Goldings aged 16 on 17 October 1946.
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The play transferred to the West End, and Frank Norman won the Evening Standard Drama Award for best musical in 1960.
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Around the same period Frank Norman was writing Stand on Me, an autobiographical memoir of his life in Soho in the 1950s before imprisonment.
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Frank Norman's next book The Guntz was a follow-up to Bang to Rights, relating stories from his life as a successful writer.
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Frank Norman's London reprinted a selection of Frank Norman's early journalism, while Lock'em up and Count'em provides an appraisal of and a plan of reform for the British prison system.
14.
The Penguin collection The Lives of Frank Norman contains extracts from four of his previously published autobiographical books.
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Frank Norman's last published work of non-fiction was The Fake's Progress written in collaboration with its subject Tom Keating, the art forger, and his wife Geraldine Norman, whom he married in 1971.
16.
In 1960, Frank Norman appeared as a contestant on the TV game show To Tell the Truth.
17.
Frank Norman was an impostor pretending to be British long-distance runner Frederick Norris.
18.
The host, Bud Collyer, acknowledged Frank Norman's writing career by letting the audience know his prize-winning play Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be had been playing in London's West End for 14 months.
19.
Frank Norman died of Hodgkin's lymphoma aged 50, on 23 December 1980.