Biography

Above (left to right), with Lord and Lady Douro in Portugal, with the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, with the Duke again, with Aston Villa owner Randy Lerner and Mark Duckers at the Villa/Spurs game 2009, and with good friends Patrick Mercer, James Falkner, Julian Spilsbury, John Strecker, Gary Ashley and Jamie Wilson at my 50th birthday bash in 2007.

If I had a pound for every time someone asked me how I got into the business of writing and touring I'd be a very rich man. Anyway, I owe it all to a set of Britain's toy soldiers when I was about 6 years old (I think: it was a long time ago). It was set of American Civil War soldiers, both Federal and Confederate. They were part of the Herald series, and were the plastic, painted figures. I still have one or two still. Sadly, the rest of my stuff, including a rather nice stagecoach have long since gone. One of the pleasures of visiting the Military Museum in Porto, Portugal, is to see these same figures, the museum having a collection of around 500,000 figures, or so it is said. Anyway, the figures, along with various other things, led me down the path to military history. In fact, history (and football) was one of the few things I was any good at at school. Well, given the twenty odd books I've written I suppose my old english teachers would be a little impressed. School to me was Dartford West Secondary School, where I did time between 1968 and 1973. A few jobs followed once I left school but it wasn't until 1976, when I began work at the British Library (in the British Museum building) that things really began to fall into place. It certainly gave me a deep knowledge of the sources that I would later use to write my books. In fact, my first book, In Hell Before Daylight, was written whilst I was 'working' at the BL. I left the BL in 1989 and went on to do a variety of things (including two years as a despatch rider for TNT and News International) before I formed Ian Fletcher Battlefield Tours in 1998. The rest, as they say, is history. I'd already got a handful of books under my belt by this time and had a half-decent reputation as a Peninsular War historian, all of which came in useful when promoting my tours. Since 1999 my guests have included Lord and Lady Douro, Lord Digby Jones, Sir Donald Sinden, Andrew Roberts and Michael Barry. In addition to my own tours, I work occassionally for Martin Randall Travel. I've has appeared on several television documentaries including The Line of Fire, Napoleon's War, Under Siege and Sharpe's War. I also appeared (dubbed into Russian) in the award-winning Russian documentary about the Crimean War, produced in 2005. In 2004, I published The Crimean War: A Clash of Empires, the critically-acclaimed book co-written with Natalia Ishchenko, a book which was the first Anglo-Russian account of the war in 150 years. A complete list of my books can be found elsewhere on this site.