The derring-do that created Flashman

I met George Macdonald Fraser when he was the features editor of the Glasgow Herald. He was a very good newspaperman on what was a fine daily paper. James Holburn was the editor, Reggie Byers his deputy, Chris Small the literary editor, all admirable and amiable journalists. When Holburn retired, Fraser was for a while acting editor and should have been made editor and would have been fair and fearless. Had he tired of the daily grind he might have become cantankerous; but his devoted readers and Hollywood would only have had to wait another 20 years for the flowering of his prodigious talents.

When I left the Glasgow Herald, I spent three years on the Scotsman doing the book pages and then became an editor at an embryo publishing conglomerate within which was the house of Herbert Jenkins, publisher most famously of P.G.Wodehouse. The first volume of The Flashman Papers came in the following year, 1968.