20 Facts About Richard Usborne

Richard Alexander Usborne was a journalist, advertising executive, schoolmaster and author.

Richard Usborne published or contributed to nine more books on the subject.

Richard Usborne adapted eight Wodehouse novels and several other of the author's works for broadcast on BBC radio between 1979 and 1996.

Richard Usborne was born on 16 May 1910 at Simla, in British India, the son of Charles Frederick Usborne, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Janet Muriel, nee Lefroy.

Richard Usborne was educated in England at Summer Fields Preparatory school, Charterhouse School and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a prominent sportsman, competing in association football and squash rackets.

Richard Usborne abandoned publishing and moved back into advertising, working for the large London Press Exchange.

Richard Usborne was later recalled home and spent the remainder of the war working for the Political Warfare Executive.

Richard Usborne left the army with the rank of major.

In 1948 Richard Usborne became assistant editor of the Strand Magazine, then edited by Macdonald Hastings.

Richard Usborne was remembered for giving "warm, cheerful and avuncular encouragement to young and inexperienced budding writers".

Richard Usborne then worked on the Leader Magazine before returning to teaching as a master at St Paul's School, where, one pupil recalled, he "taught my youthful generation how to read poetry, to learn to love it and even to write it".

Richard Usborne died in London on 21 March 2006, aged 95.

In 1952 Richard Usborne wrote his first book Clubland Heroes, published in 1953 with revised editions in 1975 and 1983.

Richard Usborne had first read the stories during childhood illnesses, but had retained an affection for them into adulthood.

Richard Usborne was horrified at a proposed chapter dealing with his broadcasts from Berlin in 1941, and it did not appear in the finished book.

Richard Usborne thought Usborne paid too much attention to the school stories from Wodehouse's very early career, when, in his words, "I was hardly articulate".

In 1973 Usborne contributed to Homage to P G Wodehouse, a tribute edited by Thelma Cazalet-Keir, sister-in-law of Wodehouse's late stepdaughter Leonora.

Richard Usborne annotated Wodehouse's final, unfinished novel, which was published as Sunset at Blandings in 1977, noting that "if the going had remained good Sunset at Blandings might, under another title, have been ready for Christmas 1976".

In 1983 Richard Usborne was one of the contributors to Three Talks and a Few Words at a Festive Occasion, which contains the texts of talks on Wodehouse given by Richard Usborne, Malcolm Muggeridge and William Douglas-Home in April 1982.

Richard Usborne contributed introductions to new editions of works by Dornford Yates and Sapper.