William Pett Ridge (1859–1930), English author, was born at Chartham, near Canterbury, Kent, on 22 April 1859, and was educated at Marden, Kent, and at the Birkbeck Institute, London. He was for some time a clerk in the Railway Clearing House, and began about 1891 to write humorous sketches for the St James's Gazette and other papers. He published first novel was A Clever Wife (1895), but he secured his first striking success with his fifth, Mord Em'ly (1898), an excellent example of his ability to draw humorous portraits of lower class life. In 1924, fellow novelist Edwin Pugh recalled his early memories of Pett Ridge in the 1890s: I see him most clearly, as he was in those days, through a blue haze of tobacco smoke. We used sometimes to travel together from Waterloo to Worcester Park on our way to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening with H. G. Wells. Pett Ridge does not know it, but it was through watching him fill his pipe, as he sat opposite me in a stuffy little railway compartment, that I completed my own education as a smoker... Pett Ridge had a small, dark, rather spiky moustache in those days, and thick, dark, sleek hair which is perhaps not quite so thick or dark, though hardly less sleek nowadays than it was then. Less