Henry Duff Traill

Who was Henry Duff Traill?

Henry Duff Traill, was a British author and journalist.

Born at Blackheath, he belonged to an old Caithness family, the Traills of Rattar, and his father, James Traill, was the stipendiary magistrate of Greenwich and Woolwich Police Court. He was sent to the Merchant Taylors' School, where he rose to be head of the school and obtained a scholarship at St. John's College, Oxford. Initially destined for the profession of medicine, Traill took his degree in natural sciences in 1865 but then he read for the bar and was called in 1869. In 1871 he received an appointment as an Inspector of Returns for the Board of Education, a position which left him leisure to cultivate his gift for literature.

In 1873 he became a contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of Frederick Greenwood. He followed Greenwood to the St. James's Gazette when in 1880 the Pall Mall Gazette took for a time the Liberal side, and he continued to contribute to that paper up to 1895. In the meantime he had also joined the staff of the Saturday Review, to which he sent, among other writings, weekly verses upon subjects of the hour. Some of the best of these he republished in 1882 in a volume called Recaptured Rhymes, and others in a later collection of Saturday Songs.