Lionel Britton

Who was Lionel Britton?

Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton was a British working-class author.

Lionel Britton was born at Astwood Bank, on the borders of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. His father was a solicitor in the village, although the practice collapsed the year after Lionel's birth. Following the death of his father six years later, Lionel and his siblings went to live with their grandparents in Redditch.

Britton claimed that the National school he briefly attended in Redditch called him 'too advanced', so he educated himself for a while at his grandfather's house in Hewell Road, before escaping from the family. After existing in Birmingham for a week on just a loaf of bread, he left for London, where his first job was as an errand-boy in a greengrocer's shop, and later in an educational bookshop connected with the University Tutorial College, where one of his literary heroes, H. G. Wells, was once a tutor. He later claimed that his universities were, as he termed them, 'the penny dumps on the secondhand book-barrows' in Farringdon Road and around the British Museum, and that his finishing school was Speakers' Corner at Marble Arch in Hyde Park.