Saki (H.H. Munro)(1870–1916)

Hector Hugh Munro was born at Akyab on the Burmese coast on 18 December 1870, the third son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector-General of the Burma Police, and Mary Frances Mercer, a major-general's daughter. The Munros were Highland gentry from Foulis on the Cromarty Firth, although three generations of Indian and Burmese service had made the family functionally a colonial one. Mary Munro returned to England in 1872 for the birth of her fourth child and was killed at Pilton in Devon when a runaway cow charged her in a lane; she was twenty-eight, and Hector was two. The four children, including the unborn one who lived for some months, were placed in the care of their two paternal aunts at Broadgate Villa in Pilton.

He spent the next two decades under his aunts. They were Augusta and Charlotte (Aunt Tom and Aunt Charlie, in the family idiom), and the household they ran at Broadgate Villa was a quietly cruel one in the way that late-Victorian middle-class households were sometimes cruel to motherless children: there were rules, there were favourites among the four siblings, there was a great deal of religious instruction, and there were no Christmas presents. He drew on the aunts for the rest of his fiction; they are the Aunt Augusta of Sredni Vashtar (1910), the story in which a child's pet ferret kills the aunt and the child eats his toast in front of her body. He was schooled at Pencarwick in Exmouth, then at Bedford Grammar, and at twenty-three took a commission in the Burma Police on his father's example. He resigned within a year, invalided home with malaria, and never went back.

In London from 1896 he took up writing journalism for the Westminster Gazette and the Morning Post under the pen name Saki, taken either from Omar Khayyam's cup-bearer in the Rubaiyat or, as Munro told his sister Ethel, from the South American small monkey of the same name. The Westminster Alice (1902), Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) are the books in which Saki became the master of the very short, very polished, very cruel Edwardian story. His characters are upper-class drawing-room types who are systematically punished for their complacency, often by speaking ferrets, escaped wolves or scheming children. P.G. Wodehouse said he learned half of what he knew about the comic sentence from Saki, and Roald Dahl said the same. He worked through the late 1900s and early 1910s as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris, writing on the disintegration of the European order with the same cold eye he turned on the Edwardian aunt.

He enlisted as a trooper in the 2nd King Edward's Horse in September 1914 at the age of forty-three, having refused on principle the staff commission that his social rank and his literary reputation would otherwise have given him. He transferred to the 22nd Royal Fusiliers in November 1915, again as an ordinary soldier, and served in the lines on the Somme through the spring and summer of 1916. He turned down a commission three times. His comrades, who were on average twenty years younger than him, used him as the literary uncle of the platoon.

He was killed by a German sniper at Beaumont-Hamel on the morning of 13 November 1916, the opening day of the final phase of the Battle of the Somme. He was sheltering in a shell crater with his platoon when he raised his head over the lip of the crater to shout at a fellow soldier to put out his cigarette; the sniper took him through the forehead. He was forty-five. His body was not recovered. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing of the Somme, alongside seventy-two thousand others. The Munro name today carries his memory as the surname of the most polished short-story writer of the Edwardian decade, whose taste for cruelty in the drawing room turned out to be a clear-eyed reading of a society that would shortly send him and most of his generation into the trenches of the western front. The Chronicles of Clovis has not been out of print since 1911.