The Coin of Dionysius

Ernest Bramah was born on 20th March 1868. He was an intensely private man and very little about his life was ever released. Bramah dropped out of Manchester Grammar school at sixteen; in almost all his subjects, he was close to the bottom of his class, and took a job at a farm. His father then invested substantial sums in setting him up with his own farm but Bramah’s long-term interests were elsewhere. In his spare time he would write vignettes on local subjects and send them to The Birmingham News for publication. In a now rather dramatic change of career, he obtained the position of secretary to Jerome K. Jerome and then to editing one of Jerome’s magazines. Thereafter Bramah edited journals for a publishing firm that only ceased with its bankruptcy. He obtained success in his own right with the creation of the storyteller Kai Lung with humourous tales set in China, usually laced with fantasy elements. There seems to have been a certain vogue for stories with an oriental element at