Francis Yeats-Brown

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Major Francis Charles Claypon Yeats-Brown, DFC (August 15, 1886 - December 19, 1944) was an officer in the British Indian army and the author of the celebrated memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, for which he was awarded the 1930 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

[edit] Life and career

Yeats-Brown was born in Genoa, the son of a British diplomat. He studied at Harrow and Sandhurst. When he was 20, he went to India where he was attached to the King's Royal Rifle Corps at Bareilly in present-day Uttar Pradesh. He was then transferred to the cavalry and sent to the perennially turbulent North West Frontier region. His time there engendered in him a sympathy for the Muslim point of view, and in later years he would support the creation of an independent Pakistan.

During the Great War, Yeats-Brown saw action in France and in Mesopotamia, where he was a member of the Royal Flying Corps. His acts of bravery gained him the DFC. In 1915, his plane was brought down deep over Turkish territory, and he spent the following two years as a prisoner of war. This provided the material for his first book Caught by the Turks (1919).

He retired from the army in 1925, and joined the staff of the Spectator magazine as assistant editor. He quit the post in 1928. Bengal Lancer, his most famous book, was published in 1930. The book is a memoir of Yeats-Brown's time in India from 1905 to 1914, with an emphasis on cantonment life at and around Bareilly. An immediate hit with readers and critics, the book won the James Tait Black Award that year, and was turned into a successful 1935 film of the same name, starring Gary Cooper. In 1936, he published Lancer at Large where he showed an affinity for the principles of yoga.

During the 1930s, Yeats-Brown also became involved in right-wing politics. He was a member of the January Club, and wrote newspaper articles in praise of Francisco Franco and Hitler, asserting that Hitler had solved Germany's unemployment problem.

When World War II broke out, Yeats-Brown took up a commission again. During 1943-44, he toured the camps of India and the battlefields of Burma, gathering material for a book entitled Fighting India. He died in England in December 1944.