John Hadfield

John Charles Heywood Hadfield (16 June 1907 – 10 October 1999) was an English writer and publisher, best known for his 1959 comic novel Love on a Branch Line. Born in Birmingham, Hadfield was the second son of Heywood George Hadfield (died 1946) and Hilda Bragg (died 1959). Educated at Bradfield College in Berkshire, Hadfield's career began in 1935 when he joined J. M. Dent & Sons as an editor, a position he held until 1942. That year, he became a Book Officer for the British Council and formed a unit translating books into Arabic. In 1944, while travelling to the middle east, his ship was torpedoed and sunk in the mid-Atlantic. In the aftermath, he was sent to recover in Norfolk. Between 1944 and 1950, he served as director of the National Book League. He moved to Suffolk just before the closure of the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway branch line from Haughley to Laxfield and it was this that is said to have inspired the novel Love on a Branch Line. After the war, he founded the Cupid Press, which specialised in limited-edition anthologies of verse. In 1956, he published A Book of Britain, an anthology of words and pictures covering 500 years of art, articles and poems celebrating the…