Early Life
Arthur Bryant was the son of Sir Francis Morgan Bryant, who was the chief clerk to the Prince of Wales, and wife May. His father would later hold a number of offices in the royal secretariat, eventually becoming registrar of the Royal Victorian Order. Arthur grew up in a house bordering the Buckingham Palace gardens near the Royal Mews. There he developed a feel for the trappings of traditional British protocol and a strong attachment to the history of England.
He attended school at Pelham House, Sandgate, and Harrow School. Though he expected to join the British Army, he won in 1916 a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Despite that, he joined the Royal Flying Corps the following year, as a pilot officer. While there, he served in the first squadron to bomb the cities of the Rhineland in World War I. He was also for a time the only British subject formally attached to an American pilot unit, a unit which had been sent overseas for training.
In 1919 he studied modern history at Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining distinction in the honours courses offered to ex-servicemen in 1920.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Bryant
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)