Bernard Gilbert

Born in Billinghay, Lincolnshire, in 1882, Bernard Samuel Gilbert wrote across an unusually wide range of forms, including poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and agricultural and political commentary. Recent scholarship and local history work describe him as a gifted but long-overlooked writer whose books and articles captured the people, landscapes, and social life of the English countryside.

Gilbert is particularly associated with Lincolnshire and the Fens. Sources on his life and work note his use of dialect verse and his interest in rural England during the years around the First World War. He wrote prolifically from roughly the early 1910s until his death in 1927, and his reputation has since been revived by historians and literary researchers.

Although he is not widely known today, Gilbert left behind a substantial body of work and is remembered as an important literary voice of his region. I could confirm that he was the father of the crime writer Michael Gilbert, and that he was buried in Billinghay after his death in 1927.