Forgotten Authors: George Griffith
George Griffith was born George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones on August 20, 1857 in Plymouth, England to George Alfred Jones and Jeanette Henry Capinster Jones. The family did not have roots to any specific place as his father’s role as a clergyman kept him moving from parish to parish. By the time George was seven, his father had served in at least six different parishes.
He was home-schooled by his parents and allowed to teach himself from books in his father’s library. Following his father’s death in 1872, Griffith began attending private school , where the limitations of his home schooling became apparent, particularly with regard to mathematics. He left school in 1873 and ran away to sea, deserting in Melbourne, Australia after less than three months. By the age of 19, he had worked in various jobs in Australia and managed to travel, eventually returning to England where he began teaching English, first at Worthing College in Sussex and later at Bolton Grammar School in Manchester. He viewed his time teaching as “penal servitude.”
It was while he was teaching at Bolton that he published his first two books, Poems and The Dying Faith, both were collections of poetry and both published under the pseudonym Lara. Other pseudonyms he used over the course of his career included Levin Carnac and Stanton Morich. He also met Elizabeth Brierly, whom he married in February of 1887. They had a daughter and two sons, including Alan Arnold Griffith, who was a mechanical engineer who helped develop the jet engine.