Writer and occasional Lance Corporal

George MacDonald Fraser was born in Carlisle, on 2 April 1925 to Scottish parents. His father was a doctor and his mother a nurse. He was educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy.

George is perhaps best known for his Flashman novels, but for military historians his record of his time in Burma with 9 Border ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’, is in a class of its own.

His military career was more than Burma and his writing career extended beyond ‘Flashman’ to the ‘Glasgow Herald’ and writing the scripts for feature films, including the Bond film, ‘Octopussy. He wrote the screenplay for Dick Lester's ‘The Three Musketeers’ and its sequel ‘The Four Musketeers’.

9BORDER

George joined the Regiment in 1943 and served in the Burma Campaign with 9 Border from 1944. His personal account ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ was described by John Keegan, one of Britain’s leading military historians as “one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War”. The book covers the period after Imphal when the Indian Army were pushing south towards Mandalay in 1944 and 1945.

It is notable for describing the fear, the horror and the common place of war.

Tea

“I am not modest about this: I am probably the greatest tea brewer in the history of mankind. It is an art, and I have the unanimous word of Nine Section that I brought it to the pitch of perfection… I like to think that I imposed connoisseurship on them, once I had weaned them away from Gurkha tea which consisted largely of condensed milk.”

He captures the drama of an unexpected night attack in the jungle.

“I came awake to the crash of explosions and a hard ground vibrating under me. All round men were starting up, there were yells of command in the darkness, the stutter of a bren, the thump of grenades, flashes in the black, random shouts.”

At other times his descriptions are lyrical. A world without war.

“...looking across the empty ground to the scrub and wood. I don’t remember it ever being pitch black; they always seem to be half-light, and sometimes the moon turning the scene into silver and casting shadows across the landscape.”

In charge

George gives no details about his previous times as a lance corporal, just that he had been promoted to lance corporal and demoted back to private three times before the bombshell that he was to be promoted again and despite being the youngest in the Section would now be second in command of Nine Section.

“After that there was nothing to do ...[but] draw two stripes from the stores, sew one on each sleeve, and submit to the unbridled hilarity of Nine Section.”

Cumbrian tongue

A feature of the book is the quotes in phonetic Cumbrian. George was known to the Section as Jock:

“Ye knaw, Jock, for an eddicated feller you doan’t ‘alf talk soom crap!”

He left the Regiment in 1945 and after completing his Officer Cadet Training Unit course, he was commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders. He left the Army in 1947 and became a journalist.

George worked as a trainee on the Carlisle Journal and then in Canada and back in Britain. He  finished his career in journalism as Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald. He retired to devote his time to writing.

George wrote several series of novels, but the best known are those based on the fictitious Flashman, the school bully at Rugby School from Tom Browne’s School Days. In Fraser's books Flashman swindles, cheats and seduces his way around the globe.

Surprisingly a Flashman film directed by Dick Lester bombed, but it led George to a relationship with the film industry.

The Editor