Oswald Barron

Who was Oswald Barron?

Arthur Oswald Barron, always known as Oswald Barron, was a journalist and scholar on heraldic and genealogical subjects.

He was born at West Ham, Essex, and educated at Merchant Taylors School, London. Most of his career was spent on the staff of the London Evening News, where he had a daily column which he signed as "The Londoner". He was deeply attached to Edith Nesbit and co-wrote The Butler in Bohemia with her. He also suggested the plot of The Railway Children, and her book The Story of the Treasure Seekers is dedicated to him, 'in memory of childhoods identical but for the accidents of time and space'.

He founded and edited a profusely-illustrated quarterly scholarly periodical on genealogical subjects, called The Ancestor, which attempted to debunk many popular myths of the Victorian era and to replace them with properly referenced facts, concentrating especially on the medieval period. The Ancestor discontinued publication with its twelfth issue.

From this venture, he moved to the Victoria County History, where he contributed on matters on heraldry and genealogy. He also contributed a major article on heraldry to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is said in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to remain "one of the best and most erudite introductions to the subject."