John Ronald Skirth (11 December 1897[citation needed] – 1977) was a British soldier who served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during the First World War.

In the First World War, having volunteered for the British Army under the Derby Scheme, and having requested that the process be expedited, he was called up in October 1916, two months before his 19th birthday.

[7] During the Battle of Passchendaele, Skirth and another friend, Jock Shiels, left their post when they discovered that their commanding officer had ignored an order to withdraw from the front line.

[12] He also began a campaign of small acts of sabotage, introducing minor errors into his trajectory calculations so as to mistarget the guns, such that they "never once hit an inhabited target" on the first attempt, giving the enemy a chance to evacuate.

In his forties by this point and suffering from ill health, he was not expected to fight,[24] but his anti-war views earned him the labels "crank, visionary, communistic and impractical".

[25] After the war, the family returned to Ealing, where Skirth and his wife Ella lived, in various homes, throughout their life together,[26] and where he continued to work as a teacher until he took early retirement in 1958.

[28][29] A self-confessed 'dreamer' with a romantic sensibility, Skirth was very fond of literature, and in particular poetry; he took with him to the Western Front a much-annotated copy of Francis Turner Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

[28] Although for many years she found it too upsetting to read in full, she felt that it was a story that should be shared with others, and in 1999 she donated four of the five ring binders, containing the bulk of the memoir but excluding its more personal sections, to the Imperial War Museum in London,[39] where they remain to this day.

[40] Once it was made available to researchers and academics, Skirth's memoir began to attract attention, and his story was featured in Richard Schweitzer's The Cross and the Trenches (2003), Michele Barrett's Casualty Figures (2007), and in Ian Hislop's documentary Not Forgotten: The Men Who Wouldn't Fight (2008), in which Hislop interviewed Jean Skirth about her father's war experiences.

"[43] The Reluctant Tommy received largely favourable reviews by Richard Holmes in the Evening Standard[44] and Jonathan Gibbs in the Financial Times,[45] as well as coverage in Socialist Worker[46] and, in an article written by the book's editor, the Sunday Express.

I would certainly buy this book even if I had not been sent a review copy, and whenever I get too misty-eyed about officer-man relationships I shall reread it to remind me of how badly things could go wrong.

The book began as the story of his marriage to the girl who waited for him back home, and that sense of a happy ending shines through even the bleakest moments.Not all criticism has been favourable.

[48]In response to general criticism received after initial publication that Skirth was a liar or a fantasist, Barrett revised his introduction to the paperback edition, published in 2011.

[50] Ward's research, which was lodged with the Imperial War Museum when it was completed in 2014, identified significant discrepancies in Skirth's account.