Poet, novelist and arms-dealer

When H.H. Asquith, as prime minister, visited Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, during the first world war, he found a vast noisy factory churning out the most sophisticated means of destroying human life. The firm, Armstrong Whitworth, would, during that war, supply Britain with 12 armoured ships, 11 cruisers, 11 submarines, eight sloops, two floating power stations, 4,000 naval guns, 9,000 military guns, 14.5 million shells, 21 million shell cases, 100 tanks, three airships, over 1,000 aircraft, together with bombs, grenades and armour plate.

Asquith was accompanied by his daughter Violet, who sat beside the chairman of the company at dinner, a gigantic figure who her father described as having a ‘rather melancholy face and voice and the general air of a transplanted hidalgo’. They fell to discussing books, and she said to the armaments boss: ‘There is one book you must read. I cannot tell you why because its quality is indescribable — it is called The Nebuly Coat.’ ‘I wrote it’, he said. His name was John Meade Falkner.

Falkner remains a mystery man, and in his wonderful book John Meade Falkner: Abnormal Romantic, Richard Davenport-Hines has stylishly allowed him to remain a mystery. He was the child of a Dorset parson who went up to Oxford (Hertford College), got himself a bad degree and, unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps, drifted into the inevitable teaching. A friend who was a housemaster at Eton, Henry Luxmoore, recommended Falkner as tutor to cram the son of Sir Andrew Noble, the operational head of Armstrong Whitworth. What Davenport-Hines describes so well is the almost Widmerpudlian pushiness with which Falkner became Noble’s protégé, working his way up the firm’s hierarchy and ruthlessly undermining the ambitions of his rivals.