Geoffrey Household was born on 30th November 1900.  His father was Secretary of Education for Gloucestershire and had himself dabbled in writing with a little success.  His mother Beatrice, is hardly mentioned in Geoffrey's autobiography Against the Wind written in 1958, and he and his brother, Humphrey were brought up by “nanny”.

Geoffrey had a good academic brain and exams did not phase him at all, which led to scholarships, which eased the financial burden on his parents and led to Magdalen College Oxford.  He graduated with a 1st, but in 1922 this by no means guaranteed a job.  He had a banker friend in Bucharest who offered him (the equivalent of a modern day apprenticeship) to go and learn to be a banker for a salary of £400 a year.  Geoffrey, who always had a taste for the unusual and glamorous, decided to travel across Europe on the Orient Express. 

During his time in Bucharest he was actually quite wealthy.  His salary was soon raised to £700, and with the Romanian leu falling from 25 to 700 to the pound he was enjoying the high life!  He returned to England in 1923 and soon realised that he could not get a job in London providing him with anything like the lifestyle he had previously enjoyed. He returned to Bucharest! His love life at this time was somewhat complicated (and remained so until he married his Hungarian wife, Ilona in 1943) but suffice to say he had to leave Bucharest in a hurry, and needing to still work abroad he became a salesman for Elders and Fyffes selling bananas.  He lived in Spain, near Bilbao. He spoke fluent Spanish (with a very strong English accent!)

He was 28 when he realised that he needed to earn some more money.  His current partner lived in America and took some of his short stories to Brandt and Brandt the New York literary agents. They took them, and Geoffrey's life changed and he was able to give up bananas. He worked in New York fact finding and editing children's encylopaedias, while continuing to have moderate success in short story writing. In 1939 Rogue Male was serialised in four instalments in the Atlantic Monthly Press before being published in one volume.

He received a call from the War Office requesting him to report within 24 hours.  There followed his time in Field Security in Persia, British Military Mission in Bucharest and Security Intelligence in the Middle East. He subsequently wrote in his autobiography: “My feeling for Nazi Germany had the savagery of a personal vendetta.”  Geoffrey Household knew what Hitler was capable of long before others realised the impending horror.  Unfortunately, the publication of Rogue Male in September 1939 meant that it didn't come to public attention until  the War ended. In 1945, after the War he settled down to become a full-time author.  There followed 37 novels and numerous books of short stories as well as children's books.  The 1950s and 60s saw him write A Rough Shoot (1951) A Time to Kill (1952), Fellow Passenger (1955) and the successful Watcher in the Shadows (1960).  His last novel was published in the year of his death Face to the Sun (1988.)

Geoffrey was a tremendous character – the type of person who everyone would be drawn to when entering a room.  During the filming of the BBC adaption of Rogue Male in 1976, he stood on the sidelines, pipe in mouth, roaring his approval at Peter O'Toole in the title role.  The two of them consumed vast quantities of alcohol before filming resumed after lunch.

Geoffrey Household was a true Englishman.  He loved his gardening, was passionate about cats, very rarely had his pipe out of his mouth, ate three large meals a day (cooked with some expertise by Ilona) drank vast quantities of Spanish Rioja, pink gin and rough cognac and above all loved life.  He disliked the title of “novelist” and thought of himself as a “craftsman.”  He would be proud, but not entirely surprised, that Rogue Male has remained in print and is now being recognised with a major film in the pipeline. He wrote: “The narrator of Rogue Male was a highly educated man, packed with class traditions and suppressions.  He was fully capable of thinking anything..............he would never admit his suffering to anyone but himself.......the ornament of language had to be confined to simple flashes of agony.”

Sadly Geoffrey Household suffered from Alzheimers in the last two years of his life, but even when this had kicked in he was still writing, maybe the above passage becomes relevant during that time.  He died peacefully on October 4th 1988 at the age of 87.