Frank Hird

Frank Hird, by Henry Scott Tuke commissioned by Lord Ronald Gower (1894)

Frank Hird (1873–1937) was a journalist and author of several books, including a biography of the explorer H M Stanley. He was the companion and lover, and later adopted son, of the sculptor and writer Lord Ronald Gower.

Frank Hird was born in Hull and became secretary to the Parliamentary Counsel Lord Thring. He was suffering fron rheumatic fever when Lord Ronald first met him in 1893. In 1898, by then Rome correspondent for the Morning Post, he accepted Lord Ronald's invitation to live with him as his adopted son, and they stayed together until Lord Ronald's death in 1916.

Published works

Frank Hird wrote a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the following.

• H. M. Stanley. The authorized life. With plates, including portraits by Frank Hird and Henry Morton Stanley (1935)
• The Cry of the Children: An Exposure of Certain British Industries in Which Children are Iniquitously Employed (1898)
• Rosa Bonheur (1904)

"The most popular artist of nineteenth-century France, Rosa Bonheur was also one of the first renowned painters of animals and the first woman awarded the Grand Cross by the French Legion of Honor. ... Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women."

• Victoria the Woman (1908)
• Lancashire Stories: Containing All That Appeals To The Heart And The Imagination In The Lancashire Of To-Day And Of Many Yesterdays (c.1912)
• The Bannantyne Sapphires (1928; also serialised in The Examiner, Launceston, Tasmania, 1930)

Frank Hird shares Lord Ronald's grave in St Paul's Churchyard, Rusthall.