Samuel Levy Bensusan (29 September 1872 – 11 December 1958) was an English born author, playwright and expert on country matters. He was born in Dulwich and died aged 86 at Hastings, and was the son of a Jewish feather merchant, Jacob Samuel Levy Bensusan (1846 – 1917) and Miriam Bensusan (1848 – 1926).

Early life

Bensusan was articled to a firm of solicitors following his education at the City of London School and the Greater Ealing School. However, he soon left this to pursue a writing career gaining, first, the role of music and drama critic for the Gentleman's Journal in 1893 and then for The Illustrated London News. He was soon gaining commissions for articles published in other well known and successful journals including Vanity Fair and the Daily Sketch. An article Bensusan wrote in 1896 on the mistreatment of performing animals for the English Illustrated Magazine created a storm and, ultimately, led to the enactment of an Act of Parliament to prevent cruelty to performing animals.[1] In 1897, in addition to his own writing, he took on the editorship of the Jewish World. In 1899 he started visiting and staying at a farmhouse in Asheldham in Essex in order to engage in country pursuits. Even though Bensusan wrote about the cultures and artists of many foreign lands, his engagement with the East Anglian land and people was to have a dramatic influence on his writing and research interests. Bensusan was to become an expert on the Essex dialect spoken in the area which only persisted because of the remoteness of the settlements. At this point in his career, Bensusan's writings were dominated by studies of famous artists, playwrights and foreign countries. His brother-in-law, the artist Lucien Pissarro[2] who was married to his sister Esther, authored one, and Bensusan authored seven, of the 38 volumes of the illustrated works of artists in the series Masterpieces in Colour[3] published in 1907.

Essex

In 1906, Bensusan cemented his connection with the county by acquiring a 50 acre farm near Great Easton, not far from Easton Lodge the home of Lord and Lady Warwick. Near neighbours also included H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and R. D. Blumenfeld (editor of the Daily Express) and Gustav Holst who lived for a time at Thaxted and developed an interest in folksong there. Bensusan was in contact, not only with these luminaries, but many others as is evident in letters to people such as Rudyard Kipling, Adrian Bell, Sidney Olivier and others who had an interest in land use, agriculture and country issues.[4] In 1909 he married Marian Lallah Prichard. Being close to the Essex home of the Countess of Warwick, the Bensusans were part of the social scene associated with that lady including the theatrical,[5] agrarian and horticultural interests she also had in common with Bensusan. Bensusan was said to be the ghost writer of some of the Countess's books. He was to write at least 25 books on agricultural matters and was briefly employed in the press department of the Board of Agriculture between 1919 and 1921. Bensusan developed an interest in recording the local East Anglian dialects and incorporated such diction in some of the plays and novels he wrote, for example, Joan Winter (1933), Right Forward Folk (1949) and Marshland Voices (1955).

Publications

The OCLC World Catalogue lists almost 200 titles authored by Bensusan[6] a sample of titles available to view online include:

• Morocco, 1904[7]
• Charles Lamb: His homes and haunts, 1910[8]
• Tintoretto, 1907[9]
• William Shakespeare: His homes and haunts, 1912[10]

References

External links

• Bensusan's entry at Who's Who
• Bensusan's entry at Oxford Dictionary of National Biography