Leslie Thomas: Author of ‘The Virgin Soldiers’
1931 - 2014
LESLIE Thomas, who has died aged 83, was one of Britain’s most popular writers. He was the author of more than 30 books, but it was his first novel, The Virgin Soldiers, a comic work inspired by his experiences of national service, that made him a household name.
Published in 1966, the novel turns on the adventures in Singapore during the Malayan Emergency of Private Brigg, a career soldier called Sergeant Driscoll and Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the regimental sergeant major and the object of both men’s desires. Brigg has to undergo the terror of combat as well as the tedium of garrison duty, and has his first sexual encounter with a local prostitute known as “Juicy Lucy”— a mirror of Thomas’s own experience in the Far East.
The Virgin Soldiers has sold millions of copies and remains Thomas’s best-known book. In 1969, it was turned into a film starring Hywel Bennett, Nigel Davenport and Lynn Redgrave.
Leslie John Thomas was born in a council house in Newport, South Wales, on March 22 1931. He was an undistinguished pupil, although he did show some flair for English.
In 1943, when Thomas was 12, his father drowned after his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat, and six months later his mother died. Thomas and his nine-yearold brother, Roy, were installed in a Dr Barnardo’s home at Kingston upon Thames in Surrey. “We had cardboard on the windows where they’d been blown in,” he later recalled. “The flying bombs were dropping then.”
One of his many uncles attempted to retrieve the boys from the orphanage, but he failed to convince the institution that he would be a suitable guardian when he offered Barnardo’s representative a gin and tonic.
Thomas trained to be a bricklayer and then took a course in journalism. Then came national service in the army from 1949 to 1951, during which (as he put it in Who’s Who) he “rose to lancecorporal”. “I wanted to go into an infantry regiment and see the world,” he later said. “They sent me to Singapore . . . I was basically a desk-bound soldier and Singapore was an exciting place to be, particularly for an 18-year-old like me. In my offduty moments I was even a singer at the famous Raffles Hotel.”
Thomas did, however, see action, later recalling: “The jungle was pretty terrifying.”
In 1950, Thomas and a few colleagues went to Penang on leave with the aim of losing their virginity. Thomas succeeded, courtesy of an 18-yearold Chinese girl he met in a dance hall, and for a time they continued to see one another. “She had a Chinese name, but if Doris Day was on at the cinema she’d be called Doris, or if Rita Hayworth was on it would be Rita, or even Hayworth.”
The night before he returned to Britain, he danced the tango with her in a nightclub and then “I took a last look at her and went out in tears”.
On being demobbed, Thomas returned to working for local papers in the London area.
He then began a 10-year stint as a feature writer for the London Evening News, for which he covered the trial in Israel of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (“I even went back for his hanging”) and the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.
In 1964, Thomas published This Time Next Week, a memoir about his life as a Barnardo’s boy. He then decided to try his hand at fiction. He received £3 000 for The Virgin Soldiers— enough to persuade him to leave journalism in 1966 to concentrate on writing books full time. He was later paid £10 000 for the film rights.
Thomas published 30 novels, among them Orange Wednesday (1967), The Love Beach (1968), Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971) and Soldiers and Lovers (2007). He was particularly fascinated by islands and his nonfiction works included Some Lovely Islands (1968) and A World of Islands (1983).
He served as vice-president of Barnardo’s from 1998 and was appointed OBE in 2005.
He is survived by his second wife, Diana Miles, three children from his first marriage and one from his second. — ©