Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard

You do very well my friends to treat me with some little reverence for in honouring me you are honouring both France and yourselves. It is not merely an old grey-moustached officer whom you see eating his omelette or draining his glass but it is a fragment of history.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) graduated from Edinburgh University with a medical degree in 1881 and traveled as a ship’s doctor before settling down into a private practice. He wrote Sherlock Holmes stories for four years before killing off the suave detective, only to resurrect him in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1902. His historical fiction took the form of a novel, The White Company (1891), and the epic tales of the adventurous Brigadier Gerard.

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE (1925 –2008) was an English-born author of Scottish descent, best known for his Flashman novels and McAuslan stories. He was also an accomplished screenwriter.