Ford Hermann Hueffer--so his birth certificate has it--
was born on 17 December 1873 at Merton in Surrey. He
was the eldest child of Dr. Francis Hueffer, chief music
critic of The Times newspaper, and learned author of books
on Wagner and Provence. His mother was Catharine,
daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown.
Dr. Hueffer, who had established himself in England in the
eighteen-sixties, came of a family of Münster bankers with
offshoots in Paris and in New York. Ford went to an
'advanced' co-educational school at Folkestone and then to
University College School in London.

On his father's early death, Ford's home became No. 37
Fitzroy Square, London, where his grandfather painted and
entertained all the 'big bow-wows' of late Victorian artistic
society: the Rossettis (who were related by marriage),
Holman Hunt, Tennyson, Carlyle, Morris and Swinburne,
who was in the habit of feeding Ford on jujubes. There
Ford Madox Brown painted his young grandson in the role
of William Tell's son holding the neatly divided apple, and,
as Ford later recorded in Ancient Lights: 'In those days as a
token of my Pre-Raphaelite origin, I wore very long golden
hair, a suit of greenish-yellow corduroy velveteen with gold
buttons, and two stockings of which the one was red and
the other green. These garments were the curse of my exis-
tence, and the joy of every street boy who saw me.'

Naturally he came to detest 'the hot-house atmosphere
of Pre-Raphaelitism', and when he left school wished either
to enter the Indian civil service or to become an army
officer. This horrified his grandfather: Ford was a genius--
all his young relatives were geniuses. Genius ran in the
family. How could young Fordie think to do such things
when he had already written a fairy story? This story, The
Brown Owl, was soon pressed into a publisher's hand. Ford

-8-