John Foley (author)

Cedric John Foley MBE (7 March 1917 – 8 November 1974) was a British army officer, author, broadcaster, and public relations specialist.

He was educated at St Mary's College, Crosby and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. A regular soldier between 1936 and 1954, he was made MBE for his services to the Royal Armoured Corps during the Second World War.

His love of tanks was reflected in The Boilerplate War, a book of recollections of the early days of armoured warfare, and Mailed Fist, telling of his tank exploits in Normandy in 1944. He drew on his military experience in several other successful novels, including Death of a Regiment and Bull and Brass.

He spent five years as a military reporter and later served in the Directorate of Public Relations at the War Office.

On retiring from the Army, he continued in public relations, and became prominent as a consultant, being particularly concerned with the problems of American-owned businesses in Britain. He was also a director of Campbell-Johnson Ltd.

A man of wide interests, he was also known as a broadcaster and scriptwriter, and was military advisor to the popular ITV comedy show, The Army Game.

He is also the author of two screenplay novelisations, published in paperback as media tie-ins, which some sources erroneously list as original novels upon which the films were based, although each book cover states that it is "the book of the film", and cites its screenplay origins and authors.

• Man in the Moon, (1960) (film starring Kenneth More and Shirley Anne Field), based on the screenplay by Bryan Forbes and Michael Relph (Four Square Books), which is credited on the back cover
• Very Important Person (1961), (film starring James Robertson Justice and Leslie Phillips), based on the screenplay by Jack Davies and Henry Blyth (May Fair Books), which is cited on the back cover, the title page and (by implication in) a joint copyright shared by John Foley and Jack Davies

What's notable about these books, and is doubtless the reason why Foley was given the commissions to write them, is that they have direct bearing on his expertise as a military man and historian: Man in the Moon portrays and has fun with a fictional, early manned space program backed by the British government; and Very Important Person is a WWII escapade about how an unflappable professor of high government standing arranges to break out of a German prisoner of war camp. Despite their stories being lighthearted comedies, both films treat their respective scientific and military details credibly, and Foley particularizes that treatment even further in his prose adaptations, wherein humorous style and wordplay are infused with the authenticity of a narrator who knows his milieus well.

References

• Obituary, The Times, 13 November 1974