Saki facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Hector Hugh Munro
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Hector Hugh Munro by E. O. Hoppé (1913)
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| Born | 18 December 1870 Akyab, British Burma |
| Died | 14 November 1916 (aged 45) Beaumont-Hamel, France |
| Pen name | Saki |
| Occupation | Author, playwright |
| Nationality | British |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance |  United Kingdom |
| Service/ |
 British Army |
| Years of service | 1914–1916 |
| Rank | Lance Sergeant |
| Unit | 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers |
| Battles/wars | First World War |
Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
Besides his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire (the only book published under his own name); a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain.
Contents
Life
Early life
Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab (now Sittwe), British Burma, which was then part of British India. Saki was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his wife, Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer. Her nephew Cecil William Mercer became a novelist under the name Dornford Yates.
In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary Munro was charged by a cow, and the shock caused her to miscarry. She never recovered and soon died.
After his wife's death Charles Munro sent his three children, Ethel Mary (born April 1868), Charles Arthur (born July 1869) and two-year-old Hector, home to England. The children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton near Barnstaple, North Devon, to be raised by their grandmother and paternal maiden aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, in a strict and puritanical household. It is said that his aunts were most likely models for some of his characters, notably the aunt in "The Lumber Room" and the guardian in "Sredni Vashtar": Munro's sister Ethel said that the aunt in "The Lumber Room" was an almost perfect portrait of Aunt Augusta. Munro and his siblings led slightly insular lives during their early years and were educated by governesses. At the age of 12 the young Hector Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and then as a boarder at Bedford School.
In 1887, after his retirement, his father returned from Burma and embarked upon a series of European travels with Hector and his siblings.
Hector followed his father in 1893 into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma, but successive bouts of fever caused his return home after only fifteen months.
Writing career
In 1896 he decided to move to London to make a living as a writer.
Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, the Daily Express, The Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook. His first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appeared in 1900, under his real name, but proved to be something of a false start.
While writing The Rise of the Russian Empire, he made his first foray into short story writing and published a piece called "Dogged" in St Paul's on February 18, 1899. (Munro's sketch "The Achievement of the Cat" appeared the day before in The Westminster Budget.) He then moved into the world of political satire in 1900 with a collaboration with Francis Carruthers Gould entitled "Alice in Westminster". Gould produced the sketches, and Munro wrote the text accompanying them, using the pen name "Saki" for the first time. The series lampooned political figures of the day (Alice in Downing Street begins with the memorable line, "'Have you ever seen an Ineptitude?'" – referring to a zoomorphised Arthur Balfour), and was published in the Liberal Westminster Gazette.
In 1902 he moved to The Morning Post, described as one of the "organs of intransigence" by Stephen Koss, to work as a foreign correspondent, first in the Balkans, and then in Russia, where he was witness to the 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg. He then went on to Paris, before returning to London in 1908, where "the agreeable life of a man of letters with a brilliant reputation awaited him". In the intervening period Reginald had been published in 1904, the stories having first appeared in The Westminster Gazette, and all this time he was writing sketches for The Morning Post, the Bystander and The Westminster Gazette. He kept a place in Mortimer Street, wrote, played bridge at the Cocoa Tree Club, and lived simply. Reginald in Russia appeared in 1910, The Chronicles of Clovis was published in 1911, and Beasts and Super-Beasts in 1914, along with other short stories that appeared in newspapers not published in collections in his lifetime.
He also produced two novels, The Unbearable Bassington (1912) and When William Came (1913).
Death
At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he was promoted to lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper. According to several sources, his last words were "Put that bloody cigarette out!"
Legacy
Munro has no known grave. He is commemorated on Pier and Face 8C 9A and 16A of the Thiepval Memorial.
In 2003 English Heritage marked Munro's flat at 97 Mortimer Street, in Fitzrovia with a blue plaque.
After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood, which appeared at the beginning of The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924). Rothay Reynolds, a close friend, wrote a relatively lengthy memoir in The Toys of Peace (1919), but aside from this, the only other biographies of Munro are Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro (1982) by A. J. Langguth, and The Unbearable Saki (2007) by Sandie Byrne. All later biographies have had to draw heavily upon Ethel's account of her brother's life.
In late 2020 two Saki stories, "The Optimist" (1912) and "Mrs. Pendercoet's Lost Identity" (1911), which had never been republished, collected, or noted in any academic publication on Saki, were "rediscovered"; they are now available online.
In 2021, Lora Sifurova, looking through the Morning Post and other London periodicals in Russian archives, "rediscovered" seven sketches and stories attributed to Munro or Saki.
Pen-name
The pen name "Saki" is a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Both Rothay Reynolds and Ethel Munro confirm this. Emlyn Williams states as much in his introduction to a Saki anthology published in 1978.
Selected works
Much of Saki's work contrasts the conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Writing in The Guardian to mark the centenary of Saki's death, Stephen Moss noted, "In many of his stories, stuffy authority figures are set against forces of nature—polecats, hyenas, tigers. Even if they are not eaten, the humans rarely have the best of it".
- The Interlopers
- Gabriel-Ernest
- The Schartz-Metterklume Method
- The Toys of Peace
- The Open Window
- The Unrest-Cure
- Esmé
- Sredni Vashtar
- Tobermory
- The Bull
- The East Wing
Radio
The 5th broadcast of Orson Welles' series for CBS Radio, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, from 8 August 1938, dramatizes three short stories rather than one long story. The second of the three stories is "The Open Window."
"The Open Window" is also adapted (by John Allen) in the 1962 Golden Records release Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Ghost Stories for Young People, a record album of six ghost stories for children.
Television
A dramatisation of "The Schartz-Metterklume Method" was an episode in the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1960.
Saki: The Improper Stories of H. H. Munro (a reference to the ending of "The Story Teller") was an eight-part series produced by Philip Mackie for Granada Television in 1962. Actors involved included Mark Burns as Clovis, Fenella Fielding as Mary Drakmanton, Heather Chasen as Agnes Huddle, Richard Vernon as the Major, Rosamund Greenwood as Veronique and Martita Hunt as Lady Bastable.
A dramatisation of "The Open Window" was an episode in the series Tales of the Unexpected in 1984. The same story was also adapted as "Ek Khula Hua Darwaza" by Shyam Benegal as an episode in the 1986 Indian anthology television series Katha Sagar, which also included the episode "Saboon Ki Tikiya" an adaptation of Munro's "Dusk" by Benegal.
Who Killed Mrs De Ropp?, a BBC TV production in 2007, starring Ben Daniels and Gemma Jones, showcased three of Saki's short stories, "The Storyteller", "The Lumber Room" and "Sredni Vashtar".
Theatre
- The Playboy of the Week-End World (1977) by Emlyn Williams, adapts 16 of Saki's stories.
- Wolves at the Window (2008) by Toby Davies, adapts 12 of Saki's stories.
- Saki Shorts (2003) is a musical based on nine stories by Saki, with music, book and lyrics by John Gould and Dominic McChesney.
- Miracles at Short Notice (2011) by James Lark is another musical based on short stories by Saki.
- Life According to Saki (2016) by Katherine Rundell is a play inspired by the life and work of Saki.
See also
In Spanish: Hector Hugh Munro para niños
