Set Down in Malice

Gerald Cumberland was the pseudonym used by the British author, journalist, poet and composer Charles Frederick Kenyon (1876-1926). Kenyon was a librettist, essayist, and author of a few crime novels. He trained as a musician and was for some years the drama and music critic of the Daily Critic. In 1901, under his own name, he published a study of the work of the writer and playwright Hall Caine entitled Hall Caine, the Man and the Novelist, and in 1904, again under his own name, How to Memorize Music, a work for beginner musicians. As a composer, his musical scores included The Maiden and the Flower Garden (1914), an operetta for children. He first used the pseudonym Gerald Cumberland for this Book of Reminscences, first published in 1919, which was largely written in the trenches and dug-outs of Greece and Serbia, with additional material added in Port Said, Alexandria and Marseilles, while he was on active service in during WWI. Set Down in Malice was partly based on his two extensive interviews with Edward Elgar in 1906 and 1913, and also describes a meeting with George Bernard Shaw. Among other luminaries from the worlds of literature and music included in these essays are Arnold Bennett, G K Chesterton, A A Milne, Max Beerbohm, Israel Zangwill, and Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius and Vaughan Williams. This collection was followed in 1924 by a further Book of Reminiscences called Written in Friendship. 3