Langford Reed (11 November 1878 – 8 March 1954) was a British author, writer and collector of limericks, scriptwriter, director and actor of the silent film era.
Biography
Reed was born in Clapham in London in 1878 as Herbert Langford Reed, the son of Emma Mary née Williams (1848–) and John Herbert Reed (1834-1919), a manufacturer of hosiery.[1][2] 'Bertie' Reed[3] was educated in Clapham and at Hove College. In 1911 aged 32 he was a journalist living with his parents with the family home now being a boarding house.[4] He married the theatre and film costume designer Henrietta 'Hetty' Elizabeth Spiers (1881-1973) at Lambeth in London in 1912.[5] Their daughter, the actress Joan Mary Langford Reed (1917-1997) made her screen début aged 2 years in The Heart of a Rose (1919), written by her father. She went on to appear in Testimony (1920), The Wonderful Wooing (1925) and The Luck of the Navy (1927). She was the first winner of the ‘Navana Juvenile Beauty Competition’ in 1922 and in 1923 featured in the Glaxo Baby Food advertising campaign.[6]
During World War I Langford Reed served as a Private in the Middlesex Regiment with the British Army in France.[7] He was a prolific scriptwriter for silent film and was the author of a number of books of 'clean' or 'laundered' limericks which he collected or wrote[8] and various of which were illustrated by H. M. Bateman among others, including The Complete Limerick Book (1924); The Indiscreet Limerick Book (1925); Nonsense Verses - An Anthology (editor, c1925); Daphne Goes Down (1925), written with his wife; Further Nonsense: Verse and Prose by Lewis Carroll (editor, 1926); Nonsense Tales for the Young (1927); Who's Who in Filmland (1931) with Hetty Spiers; The Life of Lewis Carroll (1932); Limericks for the Beach, Bathroom and Boudoir (1933); Mr Punch's Limerick Book (editor, 1934); The Limerick Calendar (1935); Sausages & Sundials: A Book of Nonsense Ballads (c1935); The Complete Rhyming Dictionary (1936); My Limerick Book (1937); Another Limerick Calendar (c1939); with his wife Hetty Spiers he wrote The Mantle of Methuselah: A Farcical Novel (1939); and The Writer's Rhyming Dictionary (1961).[9]
A prolific film writer and director, he was known for The Tempest (1908); wrote the intertitles for and edited Chase Me Charlie (1918), a seven-reel montage of Charlie Chaplin's Essanay films released in Great Britain;[2] The Heart of a Rose (1919); A Lass o' the Looms (1919) and Potter's Clay (1922), the screenplay of which was adapted with his wife in to a novel in 1923.[10] A Freemason, he joined the Authors' Lodge No. 3456 in 1921.[11]
In his later years he lived at 59 Carlton Hill in St John's Wood with his wife Henrietta Elizabeth Reed.[12]
He died in Hampstead in London in 1954 and was buried in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead.[13] Fittingly, Reed has a limerick on his headstone:
There once was a fellow named Reed,
Who knew that the world had a need,
For limericks and fun,
And all hearts he won,
Since laughter and joy were his creed.
The laughter and joy will not die,
As angels laugh with him on high,
While we here on Earth
Should cultivate mirth.
'Tis better to laugh than to cry.[13]
In his will he left £110.[12]
