1. Lieutenant Colonel John Masters, DSO, OBE was a British novelist and regular officer of the Indian Army.
17 Facts About John Masters
1. 2.
John Masters wrote three volumes of autobiography, which were positively received by critics.
3.
John Masters was the son of a regular soldier, a lieutenant-colonel whose family had a long tradition of service in the British Indian Army.
4.
John Masters was educated at Wellington and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
5.
John Masters saw service on the North-West Frontier with the 2nd battalion of the regiment, and was rapidly given a variety of appointments within the battalion and the regimental depot.
6.
John Masters later commented that whatever rank and decorations he was awarded, he was always known to the Gurkhas as "The Sahib who shot the Bakloh tiger".
7.
John Masters subsequently served in Iraq, Syria, and Persia with the battalion, before being briefly seconded as a staff officer in a Line of Communications HQ.
8.
John Masters felt obliged to order the medical orderlies to shoot 19 of his own men, casualties who had no hope of recovery or rescue.
9.
John Masters later wrote about these events in the second volume of his autobiography, The Road Past Mandalay.
10.
John Masters left the army in 1948 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and moved to the United States, where he set up a business promoting walking tours in the Himalayas, one of his hobbies.
11.
John Masters died in 1983 from complications following heart surgery.
12.
John Masters was impatient with the literary establishment, which faulted his Indian novels as unsympathetic to Indians, and he was impatient with editors who wanted to remove the rough edges from his characters.
13.
John Masters strove for accuracy and realism, resenting it when people mistook his characters' views as his own.
14.
John Masters was extremely hard-working and meticulously well-organised, both as a soldier and a novelist.
15.
In 1962 John Masters learned what he had apparently long suspected, that he did indeed have a distant Indian ancestor.
16.
Clay's biography provides details that John Masters omitted from the three volumes of autobiography he wrote: Bugles and a Tiger ; Road Past Mandalay ; and Pilgrim Son.
17.
Apart from the autobiographical works mentioned above, John Masters is known for his historical novels set in India.