John Denham

In the short story Harlequin's Lane, John Denham is the husband of Anna Denham and an acquaintance of Mr Satterthwaite. Satterthwaite had met him at Biarritz and had accepted an invitation to stay at his place. He had been bored but somehow found himself come back again and again. This was in spite of the fact that Satterthwaite and Denham shared no interests nor had friends in common.

Denham is described as a man of about forty, and a "solid, well-established figure respected in the business world. He was clever in his own right but lacked any inamgination. In fact Satterthwaite thought of the Denhams as "philistines" and "dull philistines at that".

Denham had been in Russia at the outbreak of WW1 and had fought with the Russian troops. He escaped from Russia at the outbreak of the Russian revolution and brought a Russian refugee girl with him who subsequently became his wife.