Source: Dust-cover of his Spartacus: The Leader of the Roman Slaves.
Born in February 1897 – the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee! – F A Ridley failed the entrance examination to Oxford University and so joined Gibbon and Shelley in the ranks of the illustrious refugees from that institution. Subsequently, he received a theological education, which laid the foundations of his encyclopędic knowledge of Catholic theology and church history.
After a short experience of business in the City of London, which left him with a lifelong conviction that all capitalists are crooks (actual or potential), F A Ridley settled down to his life work as a professional revolutionary.
In the course of this work, he has debated with Harold Macmillan; helped in founding the Trotskyist movement, to be eventually excommunicated by Trotsky in person; and was mentioned by name in the Nazis’ English Death List of 1940.
A one-time member of the National Administrative Council of the Independent Labour Party, he was until recently President of the National Secular Society, fourth in succession to Charles Bradlaugh.
F A Ridley, at 65, with 20 publications in the British Museum Library and some 2000 articles to his credit, mostly in the Freethinker and the Socialist Leader, is now on the threshold of a long and brilliant career, in the course of which he hopes to see translated into fact the multifarious advanced causes which he has championed in (comparative) obscurity for a generation.
Perhaps it should be added that F A Ridley started his literary career as a pioneer of science fiction!