During 15 years’ service in the Royal Air Force John Nichol flew Tornadoes in both Air Defence and Ground Attack roles. On active duty during the first Gulf war in 1991 he was shot down on the first low-level, daylight raid of the conflict. Captured and tortured, he was paraded on television provoking worldwide condemnation and leaving one of the enduring images of that war.
He returned to active duty and was involved in policing the exclusion zone as part of the UN force maintaining the fragile peace in Bosnia. He has served around the world from the Nevada Desert to the Middle East and Norway to the Falkland Islands. John has written extensively for the UK media and is a widely quoted commentator on military affairs.
Ahead of a tour to accompany his latest book, which takes in lots of Northern venues - proud Geordie John talks to journalist and author James Rampton.
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JR: Are you nervous about doing your first-ever live tour, The Unknown Warrior A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance?
JN: I always say this about going up on stage to speak at a big conference: If you're not nervous, there's a damn good chance that you won't put on a good show! But I will be even more nervous than usual on this tour as I've never done anything like this before.
JR: What form will the show take?
JN: I will be telling the incredible story of how the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior came about in the aftermath of the First World War in 1920 when over one million British Empire soldiers had been killed, with over half a million having no known grave.
We are planning the show now and it is already incredibly moving. There will be recreations of battle, emotive music and readings from the old letters from those who were there at the time. I’ll also be using accounts from people that I met, who can help us understand what it was like back then. I'll be able to help people grasp what the tomb in Westminster Abbey means – how just one man came to represent the hundreds of thousands of the missing. I don't want to say it will be educational because that sounds like something from school, but it'll certainly be enlightening, entertaining and enthralling.
JN: What else will the show feature?
JR: We have to recreate a sense of time and place during the war - what it was like to be in the trenches and to go into battle. The theatrical team are on that as we speak. What was the atmosphere of that period when so many families across the Empire lost sons, fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. That was really quite sombre. We also have to recreate the atmosphere of that day on the 11th of November 1920 when the Unknown Warrior’s coffin was paraded through the streets of London. So that visual storytelling will really come to the fore.
JR: What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
JN: I hope that they will 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 an amazing story. I really learned something, and I was really entertained for two hours.”
JR: You have another career as a motivational speaker, don’t you?
JN: Yes. I love it because you get to meet some incredibly interesting people. I've done everything from speaking in a small room to four of the most senior people in insurance, to giving a speech to 7000 people in New Zealand. Motivational speaking is a huge privilege, but I still feel like an imposter. Whenever I see my name on the bestseller list, or somebody wants to do an interview with me, or somebody says, “We're going to start selling theatre tickets for your show,” I feel like an imposter. I have done ever since getting commissioned!
JR: What do you talk about in your motivational speeches?
JN: I tell the story of my Gulf War. I’m saying, “This is what happened to me when I was faced with incredible adversity.” When you're faced with a wall of adversity, and you don't know how you're going to cope. Then you get through it, come out the other side and you've learned a huge amount about yourself, about the people that you work with, about the job that you do. People find my Gulf War story exciting and enthralling. It gets them going and they have their hands over their mouths when I tell them some of the brutal bits, or the moments where I nearly died. But there some really quite funny bits in there as well. I'm not a comedian, but there are some quite funny aspects about being shot down, captured and tortured. Honestly.
JR: What are the funny elements that you talk about?
JN: There are a number. For instance, when John Peters and I were shot down, the first thing we had to do was activate a location device that sends a signal and gives your colleagues your position. But when I pulled the handle to activate it, an orange life jacket inflated around my neck, so I'm standing in the desert wearing a life jacket. We also had a survival pack, which had basic things in it, like food, location flares, water. It also contained less useful desert survival stuff, like an axe and a fishing line! To get into this survival pack, you have to pull a handle on the side. It sounds daft now, but when I pulled the handle on the side of the survival pack, a day-glow orange sea dinghy inflated in the desert. That was like having a band of the Royal Marines parading up and down, advertising your position!
JR: Tell us about how you joined the RAF.
JN: We were a family of six living in a council house. I was lucky enough 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.” That was it. I joined as an electronics technician. 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.
JR: Did you enjoy your time in the RAF?
JN: Yes. I loved every minute of it. For somebody like me, who'd been in the Scouts and was quite happy living under canvas and having adventures, the RAF was great. At the age of just 18, I was on the ship in the Falklands. It was after the shooting had stopped, but I did three months on a Task Force ship, providing secure secret communications on a refuelling tanker. We would go trawling up and down the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic refuelling Task Force ships. That was amazing as an 18-year-old. Then I went all over the world - Kenya, Cyprus, Norway, Denmark, the Gulf and Bosnia. It was just a fantastic experience as a young man. I loved my time in the air force.
JR: Did you take pleasure in eating in the officers’ mess?
JN: Absolutely. When I was there, the officers’ mess was still quite old-fashioned. There was still silver service, and you'd still dress for dinner. Somebody would come and take your order, and then somebody else would come with a platter and serve your food for you. For a kid from a council estate, it was quite enlightening, to be honest - a very, very different experience for a young man from my background.
JR: I understand you are an excellent cook. Do you have a signature dish?
JN: I do like to do a beef wellington, which requires quite a bit of care. But one of my favourites, because it is quite easy, is a slow-roasted shoulder of lamb. You roast the meat for maybe six hours, at about 120 degrees, so by the end you can just pick pieces off it. It's just beautiful with a bit of seasoning and a bit of red wine. You crisp it up under the grill before you serve it with dauphinoise potatoes and green beans in lemon and garlic. It’s great because you can do everything in advance. So, you're not slaving over a stove when you've got guests. It's dead easy – and it’s delicious!
JR: What other hobbies do you have?
JN: We’ve got a dog called Ralph. He's our fourth Golden Retriever. I spend at least two hours a day walking him. Socialising is my other hobby. We love having people round and going out with friends. I used to play quite a bit of golf, but my days of sporting activities are gone, I'm afraid, with my knackered back and my knackered knees and everything else!
JR: You were incredibly brave when you and your colleague John Peters were shot down and captured during the Gulf War in 1991. What are your memories of that now?
JN: First of all, it was traumatic, there’s no doubt about that. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But I would probably question the concept of bravery because to be brave, you have to do something extra in the face of adversity. And I didn't do anything extra. I had adversity meted upon me for seven weeks. It was pretty hideous adversity, but I didn't do anything brave. To be brave you have to have a choice to do something different. I've met a lot of truly brave people who have won some of our nation’s highest awards for valour - The Victoria Cross, The George Cross, The Military Cross, things like that. So, I would say that I didn't do anything brave.
JR: During that dreadful time, did you ever give in to despair?
JN: I don't think I ever did succumb to despair. I certainly experienced fear, though. It was a fear that it is quite difficult to explain. The level of fear, on occasions, was hideous. When we were in different buildings that were being bombed by our mates, I had truly reconciled myself to the concept that I was going to die because the building was coming down around us. At that moment, there was an abject, unimaginable fear. There was also a fear of fear. For instance, when you can hear somebody else being beaten and then you notice footsteps outside your cell door, you know it's coming towards you. But on the two or three occasions when I thought I was going to die, I'd be quite curious.
JR: Can you expand on that?
JN: I wondered what it was going to be like on ‘the other side’. When I knew I was going to die, I felt quite calm. There was an incredible fear in the run-up to it, but then an acceptance of it: “OK, this building's coming down, or this guy's got a gun against my head and he's going to pull the trigger. What is death going to be like? Is there an afterlife? Is there a god? Am I going to meet the mates who'd been killed in flying training accidents? Are they all going to be there at the pearly gates with a band playing?” I found it all quite calming really, until the moment where I didn’t actually die. There was a calmness and a resignation about the fact that I was going to die. But then when you find out you are not dead, then the fear ramps back up. You've got to go through it all again.
JR: How did you get through seven weeks of being subjected to the most appalling treatment?
JN: I'm not trying to be a smart here, but my response to that is, “How do you not get through it?” 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? What is the mechanism for ‘giving up’? When I was held in in the Mukhabarat, the secret police, headquarters for four weeks, I don't think I saw another person. It was a hideous experience. I was starving – well, I was a bit tubby back then, so starving would have taken me quite a long time! But I think I lost three stone in seven weeks. When I came back to Cyprus and had my medical, the doctor said to me, “You’re still a little bit overweight, so you'll need to get a few more pounds off!” So, when all of those hideous things were happening, I had no choice but to exist amidst adversity. I didn't cope. I just existed. It was truly awful, but I didn't actually do anything brave. Or even interesting.
JR: Do you still feel animosity towards your captors?
JN: No. I never did, not for one single second. They were just doing their job. We were bombing their country. We were killing their friends. They were brutal, and they broke some of the rules of war or humanity. When we were kept by the Mukhabarat, that was pretty brutal, and when we were held in Abu Ghraib prison, that was hideous beyond compare. Some of the guards were truly evil people. But the Iraqis as a whole were not an evil people. I can imagine that if an Iraqi jet had been shot down, after bombing our air base and killing me and my mates, the engineers who looked after our aircraft and the teams who protected us would have been mightily cheesed off. So, I had no animosity towards the Iraqis whatsoever.
JR: How did you recover from such a severe trauma?
JN: 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. In the immediate aftermath, you don't have any post-traumatic stress disorder. You just want to get home. But the RAF, to my intense annoyance, said, “You're not going home. We're holding you in Cyprus with our medical and psychiatric teams.” I railed against this. We had an RAF Wing Commander, who, incidentally, went on to look after John McCarthy, Terry Waite and many others. He was an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he was a senior officer, I stood toe to toe with him and said, “This is ridiculous, Sir. I'm only doing this because you're ordering me to.” But he was right. It wasn't until many years later that I realised how badly I'd been affected.
JR: How did your PTSD manifest itself?
JN: My parents lived close to a railway line in North Shields on the outskirts of Newcastle. As trains went past, I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating. I didn't understand why this was happening. But it transpired that it was because the train sounded like a low flying aircraft coming over you. So, when we were in the buildings which were bombed, that was the noise of either the missile coming in or the aircraft flying nearby. And that was an absolute trigger. Also, when fireworks were exploding, I couldn't understand why I was really jumping. A car backfiring or even a car door slamming or any loud noise which mirrored a bomb going off had the same effect. That all manifested itself as part of my post-traumatic stress disorder, and 33 years on, that is still there.
JR: What else still triggers you?
JN: Even last night, our dog saw a squirrel in the garden. He was just lying there completely quiet, and he just went mad, barking. I just reacted and ducked down in the kitchen because the dog has a loud bark, and I got such an intense and sudden shock. So that that was a very real manifestation of any residual PTSD. But I was one of the lucky ones. Even though I had railed against him at the time, I still thank the RAF Psychiatrist for what he did. I have an injury of the mind, which is what post-traumatic stress disorder is. It's no different to an injury of your arm or your leg. But if you've got your arm in a sling because it's been broken, people can see that you have got an injured arm. However, you can't see an injury of the mind. That’s a huge problem for the military, especially the generation after me, who went through Iraq and Afghanistan time and time again. For police officers and ambulance paramedics, those hidden injuries are also quite traumatic. Sadly, we still see a huge number of suicides among the rescue services and the military. It's still a massive problem, especially as we men don't really talk about it.
JR: How did that traumatic time change your life?
JN: It’s a Sliding Doors moment. I don't know what I would be doing if I hadn't been shot down. And it's not just the shooting down because there were several people captured. It was being paraded on TV – those famous pictures that were flashed around the world of me and John Peters as prisoners on Iraqi TV. That was the worst moment of my life. It was a source of shame. It was a source of humiliation.
I felt I had let the side down. It brought me to literal tears. I cried. But if I had not been shot down and paraded on TV, I don't know what I would have been doing, but I guess wouldn't have been doing this – writing books and preparing for a nationwide theatre tour! I wouldn't be married to the lady sitting on the patio working in the sun outside. I wouldn't have my wonderful daughter just getting ready to go out. I wouldn't have the dog wandering around. I wouldn't be on my 19th book. None of those things would have happened. Being paraded on TV is still the worst moment of my life. But nothing that I do today would have come about if that hadn’t happened, and that's quite curious to think about.
JR: What gave you the idea to write your latest book, The Unknown Warrior, on which your tour is based?
JN: It's my 19th book. All my previous books have been aviation themed. The last four, Spitfire, Lancaster, Tornado and Eject! Eject! have all been Sunday Times bestsellers. If you'd have said to me, 33 years ago, when I was sitting in a cell in Baghdad, that I would go on to write 19 books, that they would sell millions of copies, and that six would be Sunday Times bestsellers, I would have thought you were mad! I've always written about subjects which I really know about. But after EJECT! EJECT! I had run out of aviation-based subjects. So, I was looking for a new subject. I'd been to a service in Westminster Abbey for the RAF’s 100th anniversary. I was looking after one of our old WW2veterans, sadly gone now. He was chatting to me about The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. I didn't really know anything about it. I thought, “This is amazing. I want to find out more about it”.
JR: How did you discover more?
JN: I knew I wasn't going to be able to speak to anybody involved because it happened 104 years ago. So, I decided I was going to retrace the journey, find out what it meant, how it happened, and to try to bring it to life. Because there was nobody alive, I could speak to, I went to people who could help me understand what it was like. The Padre who came up with the concept, David Railton, was long dead, of course, but his daughter-in-law was alive. Sadly, she died last year, but I managed to speak to her about him and how he had related to her this astonishing concept which he'd come up with. He was extremely self-effacing, and he never spoke about his involvement in the First World War. His family knew that he had in some way been involved but didn't know the extent. He had actually won the Military Cross on the Somme, but it was never spoken about. Then he came up with this concept of a single tomb for one ‘Unknown Warrior’ to represent all the missing of the Great War.
JR: What did he do next?
JN: To make sure the warrior was truly unknown, they decided to disinter a number of the dead who had been buried as ‘unknown soldiers’. There are few accounts from people who were disinterring bodies at the time. But I went to Professor Dame Sue Black, who is an expert forensic anthropologist. She had been disinterring mass graves in Kosovo and Indonesia. I asked her what it was like to recover the remains of the long dead. She is a truly amazing person and helped me understand the brutal realities of what the men might have experienced in 1920 – the smell, the sight, the sound.
JR: Who else did you consult for your research?
JN: I spoke to Sergeant Major ‘Vern’ Stokes - the London Garrison Sergeant Major who is in charge of all State ceremonial occasions. Vern is an old friend and organises events like the Trooping of the Colour, her late Majesty's funeral and The King’s Coronation. There are few accounts of what it was like to organise the procession and the ceremony of The Unknown Warrior in 1920 so Vern helped me understand the complexities. I also talked to a lady whose father had been killed on HMS Coventry in the Falklands War in 1982. His body was lost at sea, so he hasn't got a grave. His daughter travel to the Falklands every 20 or 30 years to stand and look out to the point in the sea where he died. But that's it. What’s it like not to have a grave to go to where you can sit by a loved one? So that was all part of my personal journey of discovery, as I was trying to fill in the gaps in the story of The Unknown Warrior.
JR: Why is the concept of The Unknown Warrior so powerful?
JN: In the First World War, just over a million British Empire soldiers were killed, and just over half of them have got no known grave. They were buried unknown because there was no means of identifying them. Some were never discovered because they were lost in the mud, or they were blown apart by explosions and there was nothing left of them to bury. It was really difficult, then, for so many families in the aftermath of the First World War. And so, the concept of The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, imagined by the Reverend David Railton, was to represent all the missing.
JR: How was it introduced to the public?
JN: At a mass ceremony. If you look at the old black and white footage of the time, hundreds of thousands of people were out on the streets on Armistice Day, the 11th of November 1920. The new Cenotaph was unveiled the same day. Over a million people visited the tomb in the immediate aftermath because the concept was that the body might, just might be your own missing husband, brother, father or uncle. And that's what many at the time held onto. They had nobody. They didn't have a grave in a church in Scarborough or Liverpool. But they could stand by the tomb in Westminster Abbey and say to their five young children, “This is where your daddy is buried.”
JR: Why is it still a vital memorial?
JN: It was important at the time, and it continues to be important now because it is still a focal point. At Westminster Abbey, 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 which has got the biggest crowd around it. It's still so significant today because it represents the missing, it represents loss. There are still people who have lost loved ones whose bodies were never recovered from the Falklands or from the Gulf War. So, there are modern unknown warriors, and it continues to be a place of reflection and memorial.
JR: Looking back on your life, what conclusions do you draw?
JN: My dad worked in the Vickers tank works in Newcastle for 40 years. So, I can't really complain about sitting at my desk in a lovely office on a sunny day with my dog wandering in and out. It's not really a job, is it? I joined the RAF when I was 16 in 1981, and since then I've never had a proper job where you would have to clock in at eight in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. Sometimes it's required some hard work, and it's been dangerous, but it's never been a proper, normal job. I've loved it all!
JR: You have remained very level-headed about your success, haven’t you?
JN: There’s no doubt about it, it’s nice when people say, “I see you are back in the bestseller list,” or all these very senior people in an engineering company or an insurance company stand up and clap you at the end of a speech. But I know full well that it could finish at any time. You only have to mess up once, and that's it. But I've always said this since leaving the RAF: if something doesn’t work, whether that's writing books, or theatre tours, I'll go and do something else. If that's working at McDonald's, I'll go work at McDonald's. I’m very aware that it could all stop tomorrow.
Actually, it probably couldn't stop tomorrow because this tour is already planned. There would be a lot of disgruntled punters if I didn’t turn up!
John Nichol will be at theatres around the UK from 4 October 2024 with a live show John Nichol – The Unknown Warrior – A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance.
Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased via www.johnnichollive.com
Mon 7 Oct City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds
Wed 9 Oct The Atkinson, Southport
Tue 5 Nov Sunderland Fire Station, Sunderland
Thu 7 Nov Storyhouse, Chester
John Nichol‘s book – The Unknown Warrior – A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance is published by Simon & Schuster on 26 September 2024 www.johnnichol.com
