Author NICK HIGHAM tells us about his new book on two men with links to Devon and fascinating tales to tell

IN 1988 a man called Ronald Sinclair, living in a care home in Mannamead Road in Plymouth, published his first book. He was 99, and we can be pretty certain he was and still is the oldest debut author in British publishing history.

- Nick Higham

Ronald Sinclair (left) in his days as a policeman on India's North-West Frontier

The book was called Adventures in Persia, and it told the story of a hair-raising journey Sinclair had made more than 60 years earlier in 1926, driving from Beirut to British India. He first crossed the Syrian desert to Baghdad in convoy with other vehicles. From there, he drove on alone into Persia, over ‘roads’ barely passable by motor traffic. In southeastern Persia, his route took him across hundreds of miles of largely trackless desert and he nearly died when his wheels became stuck in the sand.

‘The trip was just one episode in the remarkable life of a man who had in his time been a policeman, a soldier, a spy and a diplomat as well as an inveterate traveller; a man who had been wounded in action in the First World War and later helped prop up the government of a breakaway state on the fringes of Russia, to the extent of printing its banknotes and signing them himself. And for much of his life he nursed a secret only revealed after his death in an obituary in The Times newspaper.

I first stumbled across Sinclair when, in my former life as a BBC correspondent, I was searching for old black and white footage of India. Sinclair had lived in India and was an enthusiastic home movie maker who left his films to the Imperial War Museum. Among the images of sailing boats and temples, bustling markets and towering mountains I found footage of another transcontinental car journey, two years after his first but travelling in the opposite direction, from Bombay to London. There were shots of him digging his car out of the desert sand, correctly dressed in jacket, tie and solar topee, and of the car squeezing past the body of a dead camel in a narrow wadi.