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John Masters 1933.
Born in Calcutta, the son of a serving
officer in the Indian Army, John Masters
was educated at Wellington College and
excelled at Sandhurst, being awarded
four prizes. He was commissioned in
1933 into the Indian Army, serving for
a year, as was the norm, with a British
regiment in India, in his case, the Duke
of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. Finally, he
joined the 4th Gurkha Rifles and served
on the North-West Frontier of India. In
1938, while serving at the depot of his
regiment in Bakloh, he organised a hunt
for a leopard that had been seen roaming the camp. However, he came face to face with a fully grown tiger that had just killed one of the soldiers acting as beaters for the hunt. From that day on, he was known within his regiment as ‘The Sahib who shot the Bakloh tiger’.
In the early part of World War Two, Masters served in Iraq, Syria and Persia before attending the Indian Staff College in Quetta. After graduating, he became brigade- major (chief of staff) of the 111th Indian Infantry Brigade, a Chindit formation operating behind enemy lines in the Battle for Burma. Later he was appointed commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion of his regiment. For the last months of the war, he was chief of staff of the 19th Indian Infantry Division in the final victory over the Japanese in Burma. For his war service, Masters was awarded the DSO and OBE. After a spell as an instructor at the Staff College, Camberley, Masters retired from the army, moved to America, and, to make ends meet, started writing about his time in the army. His books were an instant success, and he became a full-time writer and one of the best-selling novelists of the 1950s and 1960s.
Amongst his 26 completed books, he wrote two volumes of autobiography concerning his army life: Bugles and a Tiger (1956) and The Road Past Mandalay (1961). The former is still reckoned to be one of the finest portrayals of military life ever written. In later life, Masters also wrote a trilogy of books covering the changes to British society wrought by the First World War – these are considered his magnum opus.
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