By James Patton
I've just learned that Gordon Corrigan passed away 26 February. Although we were personally acquainted, as I was with him on one of his tours, I was neither a friend nor a colleague. However, for convenience’s sake, I am going to take the liberty of herein calling him Gordon.
Born in 1942, Gordon was educated first at the Royal School, Armagh, in Northern Ireland, and commissioned from Sandhurst in 1962. He then served in the British Army until 1998; most of his field service was with the 6th (Queen Elizabeth's Own) Gurkha Rifles. The Gurkhas took him to Hong Kong, Borneo, Berlin, Cyprus, Belize, and Belfast. Not an academically trained historian, he nevertheless published 11 excellent books about historical subjects, ranging from the years 1337 to 1945.
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| The Soldier |
Later, with his droll wit apparent, he wrote about how he became a historical writer. “I was well aware that working for a civilian would get me sacked in the first week, probably for telling the boss that he was incompetent or corrupt or both, so whatever I did I had to be self-employed. As there is not a great call for the skills of killing people and blowing things up in civilian life, at least not if one wishes to stay inside the law, I calculated that the only things that I knew a great deal about, and which might earn me a living, were horses and history. As working with horses is a recipe for going bust [he had been involved in horse racing in Hong Kong] … it had to be history. I thought I could write … and while I was still serving I sat down each evening and bashed out what became my first published book, Sepoys in the Trenches, about the Indian Corps on the Western Front… It sold well for a niche market work, but there was no advance and it made me little money…” Sepoys did make some ripples in the pond of WWI literature, and he was able to sell his next work Wellington: A Military Life (2001), about Sir Arthur Wellesley, which began Gordon’s life-long interest in the duke. His big splash came next with Mud, Blood and Poppycock – Britain and the First World War (2003), which became a UK non-fiction best seller, with 10,000 hard back sales and 90,000 in paperback, still in print and also available in audio books and Kindle. Other works followed: Loos 1915: The Unwanted Battle (2005), Blood, Sweat and Arrogance (2006), The Second World War: A Military History (2010), A Great and Glorious Adventure: The Hundred Years War (2013), Waterloo: A New History (2014), Haig: Defeat into Victory (2015), England Expects: The Battle of Sluys (2016) and The Battle of Stalingrad (2022).
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| Gordon's Bestseller, Still Available HERE |
Quoting Gordon again: “I got into television purely by accident, when David Chandler, Britain’s leading Napoleonic scholar, had a stroke and recommended me as his replacement–have a dinner party and you can bore ten people, write a book and bore ten thousand, get on telly and bore millions. . . I enjoy TV and I do not find it difficult, and nor would anyone who has been a soldier and spent most of his life speaking on the hoof [one of his outstanding traits was his ability to go off-script], but fortunately the makers of TV films do think it is difficult and pay accordingly.” His television appearances included The Gurkhas (BBC 1995), Battlefield Detectives (History Channel 2003-6), Tanks! (PBS 2004), Great British Commanders (Syndicated—The Conqueror’s Series 2005 ) and Napoleon’s Waterloo (BBC 2015). He has 14 lectures available online, including a series on the current Russia-Ukraine War. Also in the online world, he ran a blog. He also delivered hundreds of in-person or Zoom lectures, in both the UK and the USA, as well as on Silver Sea Cruises and Golden Eagle Rail Journeys.
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| The Battlefield Guide |
Although over the years I have reconnected with Gordon through his lectures for the Western Front Association and by following his blog, Foremost though, I will remember him because of my aforementioned tour. About tour leading, Gordon wrote “My books have … earned me respectable amounts—but still not enough to keep a hunter [horse], a decent wine cellar and a wife, so other sources of income had to be found. Shortly after leaving the army I began to conduct battlefield tours: fairly modest ones at first, to the Western Front, Normandy, Waterloo and the like, but which repertoire expanded to include Slovenia (Lt Rommel’s hunt for the Pour Le Mérite), India (the Mutiny, the Mahratta and Mysore Wars), Pakistan, Nepal, North Africa, Tunisia and, of course, Spain and Portugal for the Peninsular War. Battlefield tours are hard work. There is not just the requirement to carry huge amounts of information in one’s head (I try to avoid using notes) but the constant questions and the need to be sociable in the evenings.” Among other operators, he was a stalwart tour leader for Holts and later The Cultural Experience. He led dozens of tours in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Holland, Spain, Portugal, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and even the USA. As a tour leader, he was energetic, fascinating, and fun.
My most memorable Gordon Corrigan story is from my tour with him. Since he was a former jungle soldier, he was comfortable with topo maps. He found a track that would cut driving time off of our trip, but after we had gone a few miles it started to narrow. Gordon was urging the driver onward, even appealing to his national pride, but after a few miles he refused to go farther. There was nothing for it; the bus would have to back out, and instead of saving time it was going to cost time—a lot of it. Gordon proposed continuing on foot. He again consulted his map and sussed out a course that most of us could hike. The tour manager was tasked with calming the hysterical Italian bus driver, and it was set for the two groups to reunite at the CWGC Granezza cemetery.
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| A Discovery on One of Gordon's Tours |
So off we went, at a brisk pace, as befitting Gordon. Two events on that trek stand out. First, we found what appeared to be an un-detonated artillery shell that was mostly buried in the ground. We decided to leave it in situ. Then we saw a man-made depression that Gordon told us to avoid, as it was not a trench, but a “waste pit” (not his exact wording). We got a quick, off-the-cuff lecture on battlefront “waste” management. We rejoined the bus group as planned, and by accident found a monument to Lieut. Col. James M. Knox DSO(2) (1878–1918) and his 143rd (Warwicks) Brigade. It turned out, as it often seems on British tours, that said Lt. Col. Knox was a relative of a tour member, who had not known that this monument existed.
Gordon rose to a respected position in the historian ranks: a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Research Fellow of the Universities of Birmingham and Kent, and a Member of the British Commission for Military History. And, of course, there is his MBE. I’ve known only two MBEs in my lifetime.
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| The Historian |
This is my favorite Gordon Corrigan quote, taken from his autobiographic statement: “Someone once said that he who fails to study history is doomed to repeat it. I prefer to compare history to map reading—how do you know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been, and how do you know where you are going if you don’t know where you are?”
Requiescat in pace, Gordon
- Source of Quotes: https://gordoncorrigan.substack.com/p/ramblings-of-a-military-historian
- Read about his funeral here: https://everesttimes.net/archives/63156 (pay no attention to the Gurkhali)
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