John Nichol, the former RAF Navigator who was taken hostage during the Gulf War who is now a successful author, shares his thoughts with us ahead of his theatre tour including the Elgiva in Chesham

“It’s rare to find a tale so strange, intimate and human yet at the same time so enormous, so global in its importance.” These are the words from historian Dan Snow upon reading John Nichol’s book, The Unknown Warrior – A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance.

John, the former RAF Tornado Navigator, and Sunday Times best-selling author, is embarking on his first theatre tour. He hit the headlines in 1991 when his plane was shot down during the Iraq war. John and his pilot John Peters were taken captive, tortured, and paraded on TV. Since that fateful moment, John has established himself as a bestselling author with 17 books to his credit, including Tornado Down, written with Peters, describing their ordeal.

Of joining the RAF John says: “We were a family of six living in a council house. I was lucky to go to a grammar school, and I got eight O Levels. I was expected to stay on and do A Levels and go to uni. I would have been the first in the family, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to get out and experience the world. I’d always been interested in electronics – batteries, bulbs, magnets. I was building burglar alarms when I was 12 years old. I loved it. I had Meccano sets, electrical sets, chemistry sets. I applied for 40 or 50 apprenticeships and got an interview in Newcastle for the Central Electricity Generating Board. As I was waiting for the bus home, I was standing outside the RAF careers office. and I noticed they had glossy brochures. Now, my brother was in the Air Force, so I knew a little bit about it, but I’d never thought about joining myself. But I got a glossy brochure, took it home, read it and more or less on the spot thought, ‘this might be for me’.

“I joined as an electronics technician and loved every minute. For somebody like me, who’d been in the Scouts and was happy under canvas and having adventures, the RAF was great. Four years later, I applied for a commission to be an officer as I wanted to be a pilot, but I wasn’t good enough for that. So, I trained as a Tornado navigator, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

So how did John deal with the trauma of captured, and how was he dealt with the PTSD? “What choice did I have? What else could I have done when I was being beaten with rubber hoses or when they were stubbing cigarettes out on my ears or stuffing burning paper down the back of my neck? Being a Geordie who enjoyed a few pints, my concept of recovering was going straight back to my mates and having one quiet beer followed by 15 extremely loud ones. I just wanted to get on with my life.”

During the First World War (1914-1918) more than 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians were killed. More than 1 million soldiers from the then British Empire lost their lives. Over a century later, around half of them still have no known grave.

John’s emotive show retraces the Unknown Warrior’s journey home from the battlefields of Northern France to Westminster Abbey to be buried “Among the Kings”. The grand state occasion culminated with a funeral at Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day, the 11 November 1920. An estimated 1,250,000 people visited the Abbey to see the grave.

“It was important at the time, and it continues to be important now because it is still a focal point,” adds John. “At Westminster, there are many, many hundreds of graves. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is the only one nobody ever steps on. Even the Royal Family, as they walk past it when they come in, never step on it. It’s surrounded by a rampart of poppy crosses. It’s always the one with the biggest crowd around it. It’s still so significant because it represents loss.

“I hope the audiences on this tour with be enthralled, I hope they will be entertained, and I hope that they will be enlightened in the same way that I was when I discovered the story. It’s an astonishing story. My hope is that people go away at the end and say, ‘wow, that was amazing story. I really learned something, and I was really entertained for two hours.”

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