EDWARD R. HOME-GALL

Edward Home-Gall was born on or around 1897 in England. He was an extremely prolific writer, especially of short stories appearing in magazines in that country.

According to the website "Bear Alley": Edward joined the Amalgamated Press in 1914 as an office-boy. His first story appeared in the semi-religious weekly The Sunday Circle and his second, a football yarn, in the Boys’ Realm, then under the editorship of John Nix Pentelow. Although under age, he managed to join a Territorial Unit and enlisted in the Isle of White Rifles, taking part in the landing in Gallipoli, although was later invalided home with enteric. He made a full recovery and returned to fight in Messines where, as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Fusiliers, he was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in January 1918. He relinquished his commission on October 29, 1920, with the rank of Lieutenant.

Home-Gall wrote hundreds of stories for the Thomson papers—Rover, Wizard, Adventure—and also the later stories of Harry Lovell & Co. for H. A. Hinton’s School and Sport after Charles Hamilton refused to write any more due to non-payment (Home-Gall was also never paid).

His fortunes turned in 1923 when he sold a serial to R. T. Eves’ young paper, Champion. For the next thirty years he wrote three 5,000-7,000 word stories a week for Champion and Triumph plus stories for the annuals and elsewhere. He was the creator of the detective Colwyn Dane, and was especially noted for his speedway yarns, claiming that he wrote the first speedway story ever published in Britain. One reader in Australia, bored with his job as a car attendant on the railways, wrote to him asking how he could become a speedway rider and followed Home-Gall’s advice… Bluey Wilkinson was later recognised as one of the greatest riders ever known to the sport."