Harold Bindloss

Harold Edward Bindloss (6 April 1866 – 30 December 1945) was an English novelist who wrote many adventure novels set in western Canada, and some in West Africa and England. His writing was strongly based on his own experience, whether as a seaman, a dock worker, a farmer or a planter.

Biography

Bindloss was born in on 6 April 1866 in Wavertree, Liverpool, England. the eldest son of Edward Williams Bindloss (born c. 1838), an iron merchant with six men in his employ at the time of the 1881 census. Bindloss had three sisters and four brothers. He spent several years at sea and in various colonies, especially in Africa, before returning to England in 1896, his health broken by malaria. Bindloss was absent from the family home in 1881, but the 1891 census found him living at home and serving as an iron-merchant's clerk, presumably for his father.

He apparently began work as a clerk in a shipping office but this did not suit his adventurous spirit, and he was at various times a farmer in Canada, a sailor, a dock worker and a planter. He returned to England in 1896, presumably from West Africa, as he returned sick of malaria. Given that he spent more than a decade at sea and in the colonies, it seems likely that his experience abroad was in two parts, first as a youth, and then as a young man, after 1891.

After returning home in 1896 he began working as a journalist, and then wrote two non-fiction books based on his travels, the first, In the Niger Country (1898, Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh) about West Africa, and the second, A Wide Dominion (1899, T. Fisher Unwin, London) about Canada. His first novel was Ainslie's Ju-Ju, set in West Africa which Truth described as "a book that has the double interest and excitement of a story and of a genuine record of travel and adventure mixed together judiciously." This was the first of nearly one hundred novels by Bindloss. The next A Sower of Wheat (1901, Chatto and Windus, London) was set in Canada. This set the pattern for Bindloss, as most of his novels were set in Canada or West Africa. The Guardian refers to him as having two strings to his bow, stories set in Canada or West Africa, with the Canadian stories being remarkably superior.