Francis Yeats-Brown

Born in 1886, Francis Yeats-Brown was a British Army officer who served in the Indian cavalry, a background that shaped much of his later writing. During the First World War he served with the Royal Flying Corps and was shot down, captured, and held as a prisoner before eventually returning to Britain.

He became famous as the author of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, a memoir published in 1930 that won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and brought him a wide readership. He went on to write further books drawing on travel, military life, and his views on culture and politics.

Yeats-Brown died in 1944. Today he is remembered mainly for the vivid, dramatic storytelling of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, a book that helped fix the image of imperial cavalry adventure in the popular imagination.