He published an account of his escape from Germany as a prisoner of war in World War I. John Alan Lyde Caunter was born in Banwell, Somerset to Richard Lawrence Caunter, a medical practitioner from Liskeard, Cornwall and Johanna Wilhelmina Koerber of Leith, Scotland.
[2][3] Educated at Uppingham School and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, John was commissioned into the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1909.
[6] While John was in captivity his younger brother Richard, a second lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Regiment, was killed in action in Mesopotamia at the end of 1916.
A daughter, Pamela Margaret Napier, was born in 1921 and a son, John Richard Lyde, in 1924, both in Farnham, Surrey.
[4] His wife having died suddenly in New Delhi in 1942,[12] Caunter married Muriel Lilian Murphy, born Hicks, in Liskeard in 1945.