H.E. Bates was born on 16 May 1905 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and a warehouse clerk.

In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener who wrote many books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After Bates’ death Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at the age of 95. They raised two sons and two daughters. Their younger son Jonathan was nominated for an Academy Award for his sound work on the 1982 film Gandhi.

During World War II, he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories. The Air Ministry realised that it might move public sentiment by focusing more with stories about the people fighting the war, rather than a focus on facts and figures. The stories were originally published in the News Chronicle under the pseudonym of “Flying Officer X”. Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories and How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France. Following a posting to the Far East, this was followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain in 1947 and The Jacaranda Tree, and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword.

The television adaptation, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories, was a tremendous success. It is also the source of the American movie The Mating Game. The My Uncle Silas stories were also made into a UK TV series from 2000–2003. Many other stories were adapted to TV and others to films, the most renowned being The Purple Plain in 1954 and The Triple Echo; Bates worked on other film scripts.

Bates died on 29 January 1974 in Canterbury, Kent, aged 68. A prolific and successful author, his greatest success was posthumous, with the television adaptations of his stories The Darling Buds of May and its sequels as well as adaptations of My Uncle Silas, A Moment in Time, Fair Stood the Wind for France and Love for Lydia. In his home town of Rushden, H.E. Bates has a road named after him to the west of the town, leading to the local leisure centre.

Eads, Peter, 1990, H.E.BATES, A Bibliographical Study, St. Paul’s Bibliographies, Winchester, Hampshire, Omnigraphics, Detroit 1990 ISBN 0 906795 76 1

Eads, Peter, 1990, Give Them Their Life, The Poetry of H.E. Bates, Evensford Productions Ltd, ISBN 0 9516754 0 0

He was also commissioned by the Air Ministry to write Flying Bombs, but because of various disagreements within the government, it was shelved, and then publication was banned for 30 years. It eventually was discovered by Bob Ogley and published in 1994. Another commission which has still to be published is Night Fighters.

Eads, Peter, 1995, The Life and Times of H.E.Bates, Northamptonshire County Council Libraries and Information Service, ISBN 0-905391-17-9

Eads, Peter, 2007, H.E.BATES, A Bibliographical Study, Oak Knoll Press & British Library, ISBN 978-1-58456-215-3 (Oak Knoll Press) ISBN 978-0-7123-5003-7 (The British Library)