Robin Maugham

Trained as a barrister, he served with distinction in the Second World War, and wrote a successful novella, The Servant, later filmed with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox.

When the Second World War looked inevitable, he declined a commission in the Hussars and instead joined up as an ordinary trooper in the 4th County of London Yeomanry tank regiment bound for North Africa.

Later, his commanding officer Brigadier Carr recorded in dispatches that Robin Maugham had saved the lives of perhaps 40 men by pulling them from destroyed tanks.

At the Battle of Gazala he sustained a severe head wound that resulted in blackouts, which he later joked made him perfect material for a job in intelligence.

His maverick style proved an effective driving force behind the setting up of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS), corroborated in Leslie McLoughlin's history of British Arabists in the 20th century In a Sea of Knowledge (Ithaca Press 2002).

The ship had been lost at sea only to reappear five weeks later after a massive search found nothing, without crew or passengers, and with four tons of cargo missing.

In the last five years of his life, with the impact of the new movement of working class realism, his popularity began to diminish[citation needed] and his health deteriorated.

[1] In November 1991 it was discovered that 24 of the author's chronicles which dated back to the war years, his friendship with Winston Churchill and his time in British Intelligence, had mysteriously disappeared from the home of one of the executors of his estate.