Inscribed by author: "Signed for Mr. [illegible] J. Cowles F.S.A. [illegible] RH Mottram, 2 May 1934"


Ralph Hale Mottram (1883 – 1971) was an English writer, known as a novelist, particularly for the Spanish Farm books, and as a war poet of World War I.

Ralph Hale Mottram wrote more than sixty books: novels, short stories, poetry, biography, autobiography, history, tour guides, topography, a study of banking--even this list is not exhaustive. However, he is usually remembered for his first three novels, The Spanish Farm (1924), Sixty-four, Ninety-four! (1925), and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926), which constitute The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914-1918 (1927). In this trilogy the futility and waste of the First World War are depicted from the viewpoints of a young French peasant woman, a Norfolk bank clerk, and an obscure provincial architect--characters whose milieux and values are rarely examined with such depth and sympathy in British fiction.