Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame was born on 8 March 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. at the age of five his mother died from complications of childbirth. HIs brother Willie, his sister Helen and the new baby Rol moved to Cookham Dean in Berkshire to live with their grandmother. There the children lived prospered in the idyllic surroundings, and were introduced to the riverside and boating by their uncle, David Ingles, curate at Cookham Dean church. The surroundings are believed to have inspired the setting for The Wind in the Willows. Grahame attended St Edward's School in Oxford and was excelled in his studies while having the freedom to roam the the city exploring historic buildings, cobblestone streets, and the tranquil upper reaches of the River Thames.
Grahame commenced his working life at the Bank of England in 1879, rising through the ranks until retirement in 1908 due to ill health. Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899 and had one child, a boy named Alastair (whose nickname was "Mouse". He was born blind in one eye and was plagued by ill health throughout his life. Alastair committed suicide on a railway track while an undergraduate at Oxford University, two days before his 20th birthday on 7 May 1920.

On Grahame's retirement, the family returned to Cookham where he had lived as a child, and lived at "Mayfield", now Herries Preparatory School, where he turned the bedtime stories he told Alastair into his masterpiece. ] Out of respect for Kenneth Grahame, Alastair's demise was recorded as an accidental death.Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1932 and is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope, also a successful author, wrote his epitaph, which reads: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time".