Francis Yeats - Brown

Francis Yeats-Brown was born in Genoa in 1886, the son of British consul Montague Yeats-Brown. He studied at Harrow and Sandhurst. At the age of 20, he went to India, where he joined the Royal Military Corps in Bareilly, in present-day Uttar Pradesh. During World War I, he saw action in France and Mesopotamia, where he was a member of the Royal Flying Corps. His acts of bravery earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). In 1915, his aircraft was destroyed during a landing on a sabotage mission outside Baghdad, and he spent the next two years as a prisoner of war. This experience provided the material for his first book about his captivity by the Turks (1919). After a temporary appointment with the Royal Air Force, he returned to the Indian Army in August 1919. He retired from the army in 1924 and joined the staff of the Spectator magazine as an assistant editor, from which he resigned in 1928. In 1930, he published his most famous book, "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer," which is a memoir of his life in India from 1905 to 1914. The book won the James Tait Black Award and was adapted into a successful film of the same name in 1935, starring Gary Cooper. In the 1930s, Yeats-Brown turned to fascism and wrote laudatory articles in newspapers about Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini. In 1939, he published the book "European Jungle," which records his encounters with the leaders of the time or his social observations in countries where the fascist ideal had prevailed. He died in 1944 in England.