John Hampson

John Frederick Norman Hampson Simpson (26 March 1901 – 26 December 1955) was an English novelist writing as John Hampson. Best known for his 1931 novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound, he was a member of a Birmingham Group of working-class authors that included Walter Allen, Leslie Halward, Walter Brierley and Peter Chamberlain.

Early life Hampson was born in Handsworth in Birmingham. His elder brother was a motorcycle racer, Jimmy Simpson (James Hampson-Simpson).

Prevented by ill health from completing his formal education, Hampson worked in a munitions factory in World War I and held a variety of jobs in Nottingham and Derbyshire in subsequent years, such as a waiter, a chef and a billiard-marker, and running a pub with his sister. A conviction for shoplifting books meant serving a prison term in Wormwood Scrubs.

In 1925 he was offered employment by a wealthy family in Dorridge, Solihull, as a residential nurse and companion for their son Ronald, who had Down syndrome. The security provided allowed him to start writing. He made a number of literary friends, including Forrest Reid, J. R. Ackerley, William Plomer, John Lehmann, and E. M. Forster.

Work On Plomer's advice Hampson sent three manuscripts to Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. Though seeing the longer O Providence as "much the better book", they selected Saturday Night at the Greyhound as most suitable first publication. The third manuscript was Go Seek a Stranger, the first novel Hampson had written, which remained unpublished due to its explicit homosexual subject-matter, including Leslie Halward, Peter Chamberlain and Walter Brierley, whose novel Means Test Man Hampson provided assistance with. Hampson became a committed anti-Nazi after a visit to Berlin in 1933, and in 1936 at the suggestion of W. H. Auden Hampson married the German actress Therese Giehse, so that she could obtain a British passport and escape from Nazi Germany.

Death The death of his employer in 1955 saw him leave the house in Dorridge when it was sold, and he died of a heart attack, lonely and virtually homeless, on 26 December.