Gentleman Jim: The Wartime Story of a Founder of the SAS - Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001

Gentleman Jim: The Wartime Story of a Founder of the SAS. Loma Almonds Windmill. Constable. [pound]18.99. 296 pages. ISBN 0-84119-340-2. This book is more than just a biography of a famous father by a dutiful daughter. The father in question, Jim Almonds, deserves a biography for the heroism he displayed in the SAS during the last war.

But the author, herself for a time an officer in the Women's Royal Army Corps, seeks to do more than this. Like many who are the children of the war time generation, she sees behind her father's heroism the outline of a world that we have lost. As she says, she hopes the book will awaken 'an interest in the moral values that underpinned the spirit of that age...a spirit of resistance against an evil regime'. In the end the author does more than this. By concentrating on one man and his achievements she tells the story of the SAS and its splendid achievements. She traces her father's military career from his work with the nucleus of the SAS in the Desert Campaign to his capture by the Italians and his escape - twice captured and twice escaped. After this he was parachuted into occupied France where he did sterling work for which he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. The author has had use of her father's own diary as well as the wealth of material in the Public Record Office. She has produced an account of bravery, decency and patriotism that cannot fail to move any reader.