Ernest Hanley Protheroe (1866–1929) was a prolific British children's author who wrote stories for boys under his own name, and stories for girls under the pseudonyms Alys Chatwyn, Phyllis Hanley, P. Nester and Marjorie Wynne. He was also a teacher and wrote numerous reference books, on subjects as diverse as natural history, railways, mining and the British Empire. During the First World War he wrote patriotic biographies on Lord Kitchener and the British nurse Edith Cavell.
Protheroe lived in Wimbledon and at Hyde in Greater Manchester, and he had five children: Alan, Cyril, Geoffrey, Marjorie and Phyllis. In his books for children we get a real sense of his understanding of a child's imagination. In the 1920s he wrote a series of fantasy stories featuring the adventurous young twins Budge and Betty, which are charming evocations of the innocence, goodness and freedom of childhood. The story 'The Tree that Ran' is an archetypal tale of adventure and faith in the triumph of good over evil. Protheroe writes: 'One could never tell what might happen, especially in an enchanted land. One could only hope for the best.' Budge and Betty are connoisseurs of fairy tales themselves—'Betty knew every fairy story from beginning to end'—and so there is a sense that these children are us, are our children, and we too can enter the stories via our imaginations.
