Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Munro, Hector Hugh
MUNRO, HECTOR HUGH (1870–1916), writer of fiction, was born 18 December 1870 in Akyab, Burma, where his father, Colonel Munro, of the Bengal Staff Corps, inspector-general of police in Burma, was then stationed. He came of Highland stock, a fact of which he was always proud. Owing to the death of his mother and to his father's absence abroad, he was brought up during childhood, with his elder brother and sister, by a grandmother and two aunts, in the village of Pilton, near Barnstaple, North Devon. It seems probable that the effect of their stern and unsympathetic methods upon Munro's highly individual and sensitive nature is responsible for the strong dislike, discernible in so much of his writing, of anything that smacks of the conventional and the self-righteous, and, perhaps, for the queer heartlessness which accompanies the humour of many of his best stories. Munro was educated at a private school at Exmouth and at Bedford grammar school. After some travel on the Continent he left England in 1893 for Burma, where he had obtained a post in the police; but in fifteen months he resigned owing to ill-health. After recuperating in Devonshire, Munro moved to London, having decided to earn his living by his pen. He began as a political satirist for the Westminster Gazette, to which he was introduced by (Sir) Francis Carruthers Gould. His political sketches were afterwards published as The Westminster Alice (illustrated by Gould). The Not So Stories (1902) were in the same satirical vein and were also anonymous. In 1900 he published The Rise of the Russian Empire, a history of Russia to the time of Peter the Great. In 1902 he went to the Balkans, in 1904 to Warsaw, and thence to St. Petersburg, as correspondent for the Morning Post. In 1906 he was in Paris, still writing for the Morning Post, and in 1908 he returned to London, where he wrote political and other sketches for a number of different papers.
Meanwhile, Munro had in 1904 published Reginald, a collection of short stories in which he first strikes the characteristically unconventional note which was to make his reputation. In this, and in Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), which are all collections of short stories, and in The Unbearable Bassington (1912), which is a novel, the characteristic note remains the same. The influence of Oscar Wilde and of the eighteen-nineties is apparent, but in so far as it made for paradox and impatience of conventional standards it was probably only reinforcing tendencies already present in Munro, and he was too highly individual to owe much to other writers. The witty and irrepressible non-moral young man who figures so prominently, under different names, in Munro's writings, though he is frequently met with in the fiction of the 'nineties and has certain affinities with Wilde's Dorian Gray, has nowhere been more cleverly presented. Munro's stories are seldom perfect examples of construction, and their often fantastic settings are not drawn closely from life; but their elvish humour, their biting and eccentric wit give them an individuality which is unforgettable, and in the art of the unexpected phrase Munro was a past master. Some of the most individual features of his work, the love of practical joking, the taste for queer and exotic animals, the lack of sympathy with mankind in general, have been ascribed, perhaps rightly, to the fact that in a sense Munro was always a boy. These books were published under the pseudonym of ‘Saki’, the name of the cup-bearer in the Rubaiyât of Omar Khayyâm.
Soon after the outbreak of the European War in 1914 Munro enlisted, and in November 1915 he went to the front in France. He proved a fine soldier, refusing to take a commission. He was killed near Beaumont Hamel 14 November 1916.
Besides the books already mentioned, Munro wrote When William Came (1913), an imaginary picture of English life after a successful invasion by the Germans. The Toys of Peace (1919) and The Square Egg (1924) were published posthumously; but they were below the standard of his earlier work. The second of these volumes contains a three-act play with characteristically witty dialogue; it also includes a biography of Munro by his sister, Miss E. M. Munro.
[Prefatory notes to the Collected Edition of Munro's Works; biography by Miss E. M. Munro in The Square Egg; private information.]