J. H. Stocqueler (21 July 1801 - 14 March 1886) was a journalist, author and lecturer with interests in the theatre and in Indian and military affairs; he lived in England, India, and the United States of America.

[1] Stocqueler purchased his discharge from the army in 1824; he had obtained a clerical job with the Chief Secretary to the Bombay Government but his increasingly radical views and interest in the press made him unpopular.

Plans to investigate an overland route from the river Euphrates to Europe via Baghdad were foiled by war and plague and he was obliged to travel via the hazardous Buctarian mountains in Persia, apparently never before crossed by a white man.

He then journeyed across Europe encountering the exiled Polish general Jan Zygmunt Skrzynecki in Linz and Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, Viceroy in Hanover.

He gave thanks for his survival when he reached London in May 1832 and published the account of his journeys in two volumes entitled Fifteen Months Pilgrimage through Untrodden Tracts in Khuzistan and Persia .

As a journalist Stocqueler observed the First Anglo-Afghan War, but on his return to Calcutta financial problems landed him in the Debtors’ Prison there from October 1840 until February 1841.

He wrote for the theatre, including the text for successful spectacles such as The Battle of The Alma and The Fall of Sebastopol, both elaborately staged at Astley's Amphitheatre in south London.

[4] He was a charismatic lecturer and provided the commentary for dioramas at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street: subjects included the Overland Route to Australia,[5] the continuing story of the Crimean War, and the exploits of the Duke of Wellington, whose biography Stocqueler also wrote.

He used family money (including all the assets of a wealthy maiden aunt) and faced bankruptcy on several occasions, even once using sequestration under Scottish law to evade further imprisonment in London.

In North America he continued to write and lecture;[8] a post at Columbia College in New York was interrupted by the onset of the Civil War but Siddons (as he was now known) offered some military instruction to Unionist recruits.

Life was not easy in London, or briefly in Ireland, and in 1875 Stocqueler returned again to the United States, settling in Washington DC where found clerical work as a civil servant and gained some reputation as a Shakespearean scholar.

Stocqueler, known at the time as Professor J H Siddons, died at home at 2006 13th Street NW, Washington, DC on 14 March 1886,[10] not 1885 in Bath, England, as is sometimes stated.