Born, by most accounts, Frank Dean in Great Britain on the Isle of Man, he set out in the early 1880s to be a songwriter in England. He used the pen names Harry Dacre or Henry Decker, which some accounts contend is his real birth name, and, by his own account, sold more than 600 songs in just the first two years of his career. His first big success came with the song "The Ghost of John James Christopher Benjamin Binns," written some time around 1885. After taking a hiatus from songwriting and traveling to Australia, then to the U.S., he returned to songwriting in a big way. It was in New York that around 1891 he published what is perhaps his best-known song "Daisy Bell" (a.k.a. "Bicycle Built for Two"). He eventually would return to England where he died in London in 1922.
