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Bohun Lynch (1884-1928)
Bohun Lynch was born in London on 21 May 1884 of Irish parentage. He was educated at Haileybury School and University College, Oxford; during his time at the latter, he boxed as a middleweight and captained the boxing team in his last year. In 1908, he produced Oxford Quips: by a Crank, which presaged his parallel careers as a writer and caricaturist-illustrator. When he gave up a medical career on health grounds, he turned to journalism, becoming Boxing Correspondent for Field & Sport and producing four books on boxing, beginning with The Complete Amateur Boxer in 1913. However, he soon proved to be a writer of breadth.
He published the first of seven novels in 1912, and wrote book reviews and articles on antique furniture. He also prepared an edition of letters that he had received from his fellow Oxonian, Robert James Fletcher, written from the South Seas; these were published by Constable in 1923 (probably without Fletcher’s permission). Lynch was a specialist in caricature: as practitioner, critic and historian. He contributed drawings to numerous periodicals, including the London Mercury and the Quarterly Review, and illustrated Humbert Wolfe’s Lampoons (1925), among other books. A friend of Max Beerbohm, he produced his caricature (Land and Water, 1919), and spent time with him at his home in Rapallo in preparation for Max Beerbohm in Perspective (1921). (His later guidebook, The Italian Riviera (1923), may have been engendered at this time.) He established his longer view of the subject in the well-regarded A History of Caricature (1926) and an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a member of the Savage Club, he mixed widely with artists and writers. Towards the end of his life, Lynch lived in his ancestral home in North Devon, with his wife and two children. He died in London on 2 October 1928.
