John Graham Bower

Born in Wynberg, South Africa, in 1886, John Graham Bower built his career in the Royal Navy and later wrote from that deep well of experience. Records of his service show him commanding submarines before and during the First World War, and he rose to the rank of Commander.

That background shaped the books he is remembered for. The Story of Our Submarines was written from personal knowledge of submarine warfare, and his work On Patrol gathered poems about wartime naval life. He also published under the pseudonym Klaxon, a name linked to both his fiction and his war writing.

Later in life he married children's author Barbara Euphan Todd in 1932, and the couple lived in Blewbury, south of Oxford, where he continued writing. He died in 1940, leaving behind work valued for its close, lived-in view of ships, sailors, and the pressures of war at sea.