Francis Yeats-Brown

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

His admiration and advocacy of Italian fascism cost him his role as editor of the Everyman paper in 1933.

Life and career

Yeats-Brown was born in Genoa in 1886, the son of the British consul Montague Yeats-Brown. He studied at Harrow and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. When he was twenty he went to British 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 Province. 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 First World 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, piloted by Thomas White, was damaged on landing on a sabotage mission outside Baghdad, and he spent the following two years as a prisoner of war. That provided the material for his first book, Caught by the Turks (1919).

Following a temporary commission in the Royal Air Force, he returned to the Indian Army in August 1919. He retired from the army in 1924, and joined the staff of the Spectator magazine as assistant editor. During his time at The Spectator, Yeats-Brown expressed much admiration for Fascist Italy, which he saw as achieving a fair and just society while also crushing the Italian Communist Party. He quit the post in 1928.