Saki - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born in Akyab, Burma (now known as Myanmar) when it was still part of the British Empire, Hector Hugh Munro was the son of Charles Augustus Munro and Mary Frances Mercer (1843–72). Mary was the daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer; and her nephew, Cecil William Mercer, became a famous writer as Dornford Yates. Charles Munro was an Inspector-General for the Burmese Police.

In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary was charged by a cow; and the shock caused her to miscarry. She never recovered and soon died. Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, to England, where they were brought up by their grandmother and aunts in a strict puritanical household.

Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth, Devon and at Bedford School. On a few occasions, when he retired, Charles travelled with Hector and his sister to fashionable European spas and tourist resorts. In 1893, Hector followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police, where he was posted to Burma (like George Orwell a generation later). Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.

At the start of World War I, although 43 and officially over-age, Munro refused a commission and joined 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper, later transferring to 22nd Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, where he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916, when sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, he was killed by a German sniper. His last words, according to several sources, were "Put that bloody cigarette out!" After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.

Munro was homosexual; but, at that time in the U.K., sexual activity between men was a crime. The Cleveland Street scandal (1889), followed by the downfall of Oscar Wilde (1895), meant that "that side of life had to be secret". Politically, Munro was a Tory and somewhat reactionary in his views.