After war service in India, Wingfield-Stratford sought no further academic advancement, instead settling down (thanks to an independent income) to a very productive life as historian and author, dividing his time between his rural home at Berkhamsted and London, where he could follow his many interests in the theatre, music and the arts.
[2] "he was all of a piece, his physical build which was wonderfully large and expansive, his high ambitions and boisterous enthusiasms which were on the same gargantuan scale, even his fierce prejudices which lay scattered like rolled-up hedgehogs along the paths of his conversation."
- Peter Quennell, letter to The Times, 27 Feb 1971[3] An especially passionate country walker, outdoorsman and amateur cricketer, his unconventional dress and lilting upper-class voice made him something of an oddity.
Though he embraced innovation and modernism in the arts, his great love was for the rural England and London of his youth, forever destroyed by the first world war.
In spite of the "aggressiveness of temper and the somewhat rhetorical extravagance of mind" mentioned in his obituary from The Times, he was loved and respected by all who knew him, as was his larger-than-life, eccentric personality.