Bio:Albert Dorrington
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This article casts some severe doubt as to the date and place of birth of Albert Dorrington:
"Another mystery writer from the Edwardian age that has been causing the Crime Fiction Bibliography brains trust some hair pulling. This one we've yet to resolve so if you don't like mysteries that are left hanging, just read the Eagles strip. Move right along. Nothing to see here.
Albert Dorrington wrote novels, pulp stories and other fiction, including, it would appear, a little fiction about his upbringing. So far we've established that he was born in 1859, 1868, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875 and 1876, according to various resources. Usually, it's just a case of checking in the birth records to see which is right, but with Albert Dorrington that's proving to be just one of the problems.
The BMD records have a number of Albert Dorringtons born in around that period, a couple of which can be immediately ruled out:
- Albert Dorrington (b. Derby, 1Q 1866)
- Albert Dorrington (b. Salisbury, 3Q 1866)
- Albert Dorrington (b. Bishops Stortford, 4Q 1869) (d. Bishops Stortford, 2Q 1870)
- Albert Dorrington (b. Kensington, 4Q 1874) (d. Kensington, 4Q 1874)"
"The most comprehensive study of Dorrington is probably the entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Volume 8, 1981) penned by Ken Stewart. Stewart claims that Dorrington...was born probably on 27 September 1874 at Fulham, London, son of William Dorrington, policeman, and his wife Hannah, née Byford"
"This does not entirely match the entry compiled by AusLit, which claims he was born on 14 August 1871 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and died in Ruislip, London, on 9 April 1953."
"A note at AusLit reads: "Most sources give 1874 as the year of Dorrington's birth, but the Bulletin Story Book has it as 1871, as does Dorrington's entry (in his own hand) in A. G. Stephens's Australian Autobiographies, vol.1. (The latter source also states the day and month of his birth as 8 August.)""
"William Dorrington was born in Romford, Essex, in 1851 and married Hannah Byford, born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1850. Their marriage was registered in Romford in 2Q 1872. If I'm right, their first son Albert was born in Fulham in 1874 and died soon after; a second son, Ernest Harry Dorrington, was born in Fulham in 1876, and is the only son to be found living with William and Hannah (at 45 Cruikshank Road, West Ham) in the 1881 census. It would appear that William died in 1884 and Hannah followed in 1888. Ernest was an inmate at a boys' home in Kentish Town at the time of the 1891 census and later worked as a soap cutter, living with his uncle in West Ham in 1901.
The fact that this particular Albert Dorrington and his brother were born in London and his parents lived in London flags up a number of questions. For instance, why would Albert Dorrington subsequently claim he was born in Warwickshire rather than London, and why would he attend a school in Birmingham? The London birth on 27 September also disagrees with the birth day (14 August) that Dorrington gave for himself."