25 Facts About Ivor Brown

Ivor John Carnegie Brown CBE was a British journalist and man of letters.

Ivor Brown later joined the staff of The Manchester Guardian as its London drama critic, and subsequently wrote for, and for six years edited, The Observer.

Ivor Brown was widely regarded as the leading drama critic of his generation.

Ivor Brown was born in Penang, Malaya, on 25 April 1891, the younger of two sons of William Carnegie Ivor Brown, a specialist in tropical diseases, and his wife Jean, nee Carnegie.

Ivor Brown's father had a practice in Malaya, and Brown was sent to England to be educated at Suffolk Hall preparatory school and then, from 1902 to 1907, at Cheltenham College.

Ivor Brown then undertook a year's private tuition with a crammer after which he headed the scholarship list at Balliol College, Oxford, where he shared the Jenkyns exhibition in 1913 and took a double first in classical honour moderations and literae humaniores.

Ivor Brown was assigned to the Home Office, where his career lasted two days: finding himself asked to deal with an application by Staffordshire police for the increased provision of lavatories he wrote his comments and walked out, to earn his living writing as a freelance about subjects of more interest to him.

Ivor Brown became involved in progressive politics, and was a conscientious objector during the First World War.

Ivor Brown lectured for the Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee, published three novels and two other books: English Political Theory and The Meaning of Democracy and wrote articles for The New Age, an "independent socialist review of politics, literature and art".

On 4 January 1916 Ivor Brown married Irene Gladys Hentschel, an actress and later a director.

In 1919 Ivor Brown joined the staff of The Manchester Guardian at its London office, as a leader writer and the paper's London drama critic, serving from then until 1935.

The Times commented that it fell to Ivor Brown to interpret "the great outburst of new and experimental modes of playwriting" that followed the war.

Ivor Brown said that Eliot "offers the public the balderdash of his Waste-land and immediately becomes a pundit, bestriding the Atlantic".

The directors turned to Ivor Brown and invited him to be acting editor until after the war.

Ivor Brown served as editor until Astor's son David officially succeeded him in 1948, after which he continued as the paper's drama critic until he was replaced by Kenneth Tynan in 1954.

Ivor Brown eventually published more than 75 books covering a wide range of topics and genres, but he was best known for his works on literature and the English language.

Ivor Brown was a member of the Literary Society, chairman of the British Drama League from 1954 to 1962 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he was appointed CBE in 1957.

Ivor Brown was awarded honorary degrees by the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen and in recognition of post-war lectures he gave in Denmark he received the knighthood of the Order of the Dannebrog.

Ivor Brown died at his home in Hampstead, London in 1974, aged 82.

Ivor Brown's Smithfield Preserved Or The Divill A Vegetarian a satire of Restoration drama, written for a charity fete, was broadcast in November 1926.

Ivor Brown wrote a one-act play, I Made You Possible, transmitted in April 1937, and had a series, "Books, Plays and Films" and appeared frequently on The Brains Trust.

Ivor Brown had a particular interest in Shakespeare, publishing several books about his life and career, and one on the poet's love life.

Ivor Brown wrote a play, William's Other Anne, about Shakespeare's supposed lost love Anne Whateley broadcast on BBC television in 1953, starring Irene Worth as Anne and John Gregson as Shakespeare.

Ivor Brown became famous for his books about words, "agreeable rambles around correct usage and philology, enlivened by literary allusion, quotation, wit, and personal anecdote".

Howard comments that Ivor Brown collected words as others collect porcelain, and was the most good-humoured of prescriptivists, but was nevertheless "incorrigibly convinced that there existed such a thing as correct English, and that it was to be preferred to the other kind".