I had different ideas about soldiering. — Flashman
In 1965, in the English town of Ashby in Leicestershire, a great literary find was made at a simple household furniture sale. Several oilskin packages containing the memoirs of an old soldier were found in a tea chest. A South African gentleman, nearest in kin to the soldier, took charge of the manuscript before passing it on to another ex-soldier named George Macdonald Fraser for editing.
None of this ever happened, but it was not a literary hoax so much as a good-natured literary conceit. The memoirs were “written” by literary creation Harry Flashman, a school bully who appears in Thomas Hughes’ 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George Macdonald Fraser rather brilliantly took the character and ran with it, creating Flashman, the most cowardly soldier ever to become a hero. The series ran to 12 novels, and the first, Flashman, begins with Harry’s disgrace. (more…)