Howard Burnham was born in Bournemouth, England. He claims American blood from his paternal grandfather, a much-traveled Californian mining engineer, who married a British girl in South Africa during the Boer War and is buried in Cannes, France, beside Admiral de Grasse, the man who made Yorktown possible. His great-uncle, Major Frederick R. Burnham, DSO, a scout and explorer, warrants an entry in the American Dictionary of National Biography. Burnham’s namesake ancestor, First Lieutenant Howard Burnham, U.S.A., was killed on the first day at Chickamauga.
The present Howard was educated at Clayesmore School, Dorset, and at University College in the University of Durham, where he took honors in Modern History. He has worked as an actor, educator and museum curator. In 1973, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London. He is the author of Grones Dictionary of Music or Misleading Lives of the Great Composers (Emerson Edition) and several more accurate booklets on theater history, published by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. He began performing his acclaimed dramatic monologues in 1981 for the first Helmsley Arts Festival, when he depicted John Aubrey, the 17th century antiquary and gossip, in the Tudor range of Helmsley Castle, one of the great medieval castles of Northern England. Subsequent one-man shows have featured Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Charles Dickens, the French romantic poet Theophile Gautier, Laurence Sterne, “the Unfortunate Doctor Dodd” (Shakespeare’s first anthologist), Joseph Rowntree (the Quaker philanthropist), and Thomas Hardy.
In 1998, he settled in Columbia, SC, with his wife, Sandra, an Examiner for London’s Royal Academy of Dance. Howard has been a Sir Evelyn Wrench Lecturer for the English-Speaking Union of the United States, touring nationwide. He is on the Approved Artist Roster of the South Carolina Arts Commission, and a Literary Resident of the Richland County Public Library. Howard’s American Revolutionary War programs include Never Play Hockey With A Bishop: Lord Cornwallis in the South (which has played repeatedly at every major site associated with the earl’s campaign,) and characterizations of Ban Tarleton, Tom Paine, Horatio Gates and Thomas Sumter. His companion piece to Lord Cornwallis: Thirty Wagons and a Wine Cellar: Johnny Burgoyne and Saratoga plays annually at Bunker Hill, Fort Ti and Saratoga. He has a War of 1812 program: The British kept a-running: Sir John Lambert on Andy Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans. His Civil War one-man show, The Lion, the Eagle and Dixie: A British Perspective on the War between the States as seen by the Artist-Journalist, Frank Vizetelly, has played at Shiloh Military Park, the SC State Museum and Manassas Battlefield. His most recent shows have been as Winston Churchill, Captain Smith of the Titanic, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and King James VI & I for the Jamestown Foundation of Virginia's celebration of America's big (400th) birthay in May of 2007.
He is currently preparing characterizations of the Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie for the Columbia Art Museum, and of Ian Fleming for the James Bond creator's centennial.
