John Walter

I was born in Glasgow, but lived in London as a child and was educated largely in Brighton. My father trained as an engineer largely in the RAF and had ended the Second World War responsible for the upkeep of B-24 Liberator bombers in British service. My mother, daughter of a headmaster, had worked for the London Midland & Scottish Railway before joining the WAAF in 1943. So it's fairly obvious where the influences on my career came from! Long before leaving school I worked for a small printing business just a few doors away from where I lived. My tasks included camera-work, platemaking, running the small offset-lithography presses, and preparing artwork. In collaboration with Gordon Hughes, a well-known dealer in bayonets and militaria, I then illustrated and partly wrote the first Primer of World Bayonets booklet while supposedly concentrating on A-Levels! I was offered a university place to study chemical engineering, but my classmates had expected me to go to art college and there had been several pointers -- largely overlooked in a classics-obsessed school -- that I had an ability to write. When I was offered a chance to enter military-orientated publishing, therefore, my life changed. I worked for Lionel Leventhal’s pioneering Arms & Armour Press until leaving, by mutual consent, as I wanted to write instead of simply helping to produce books. Since then I have completed seventy, largely on technical subjects, and translations have appeared in thirteen languages ranging from Arabic to Turkish. Who knows what will be next!