[5] He taught gunners trigonometry by writing a manual in Urdu, that he learned in three months, in which he compared the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle to that between cousins of various degrees within a family.

[3] He was invalided out of the Indian Army in 1944,[6] from whom he refused to accept a disability pension due to the country's poverty, and was then taken on by The Guardian where he became the paper's correspondent at Eisenhower's headquarters in the later period of the Second World War.

[3] In 1966, as yachting editor, he was the leader of a Guardian sponsored crew[7] that sailed a cutter from England to Martha's Vineyard via Iceland and Greenland in order to replicate Leif Erikson's voyage.

His non-fiction included East of Suez (1969), a history of BP; The Ulysses Factor, a study of the exploring instinct; The Upper Thames (1970) in The Regions of Britain series;[10] and The Oldest Road about The Ridgeway (1975).

[3] His fiction included works that crossed between crime, mystery, and the thriller, with Peter Blair and Piet Deventer as his principal protagonists, many of which were published by Victor Gollancz in their distinctive yellow-jackets.

[12] Also published posthumously was Leeches and Breeches, the memoir of a country town general practitioner physician Frederick Vaughan Squires (1895-1973) and his experiences in practice and in the First and Second World Wars.