Childhood in London and Surrey Ronald Frederick Delderfield was born at 37 Waller Road,
New Cross, London, in 1912 to Alice and William James Delderfield (–1956). His father worked for a meat wholesaler in
Smithfield Market, and was the first
Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey Council. William supported
women's suffrage and the Boer cause in the
Boer War. He was a firm supporter of the
temperance movement, and of
David Lloyd George until the latter allied himself in government with the Conservative Party. From 1918 to 1923, the family lived at 22 Ashburton Avenue,
Addiscombe, near
Croydon, Surrey.
The Avenue novels were based on Ronald's life in
Addiscombe and
Shirley Park. Delderfield attended an
infant school in Bermondsey, then a "seedy and pretentious" small private school — "seventy boys and four underpaid ushers, presided over by a jovial gentleman who wore blue serge". He then went to a council school, which he hated, but which provided him with the prototype for Mr. Short in
The Avenue. This experience was followed by a
grammar school whose dedicated teachers inspired several of his characters. Once the family moved to
Devon, Delderfield first attended a co-educational grammar school and, finally,
West Buckland School. In his autobiography
For My Own Amusement, Delderfield joked that West Buckland could be likened to schools in
The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon,
The Avenue and
A Horseman Riding By, and that it had earned its fees three times over. In 1950 he featured in a
BBC Newsreel clip of the short-lived
The Axminster and Lyme Regis Clarion in
Lyme Regis.
Autobiography In
For My Own Amusement (1972), Delderfield discusses the inspiration for the storylines and tells in anecdotes the origin of several of his characters. He believed that authors draw inspiration from the scenes of their youth, pointing out that
Charles Dickens' characters nearly always used the
stagecoach, when he was writing in the age of the train. Delderfield calls his sources "character farms", the main ones being his time in Addiscombe, schooldays, and his time at the
Exmouth Chronicle. Of
The Avenue and
A Horseman Riding By he said, "I set out to tell a straightforward story of a group of undistinguished British people—the only kind of people I really know." Delderfield pointed out in this autobiography that he had been criticized for his very conventional views of women's social roles.
Death Delderfield died at his home, then called Dove Cottage, in
Sidmouth of
lung cancer, and was survived by his widow, the former May Evans, whom he married in 1936. They had a son and a daughter. A brother, Eric Delderfield (1909–1995) survived him and wrote several books on the history of England's
West Country. ==Early 20th century social history as a subject of his writing==