Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley, MC was a British Army officer, author and journalist. He was commissioned in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and served with them during the First World War. After the war he spent seven years in the Sahara desert, and then travelled through Asia. His first novel, Yasmina, was published in 1927 and sold well.
About R. V. C. Bodley in brief
Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley, MC was a British Army officer, author and journalist. Born to English parents in Paris, he lived in France until he was nine, before attending Eton College and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was commissioned in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and served with them during the First World War. After the war he spent seven years in the Sahara desert, and then travelled through Asia. Bodley was considered among the most distinguished British writers on the Sahara, as well as one of the main western sources of information on the South Seas Mandate. He moved to the United States in 1935, where he worked as a screenwriter. He rejoined the British Army at the outbreak of the Second World War and was sent to Paris to work for the Ministry of Information. He later immigrated to the U.S. where he continued to work as a writer and also as an advisor to theUnited States Office of War Information. His first novel, Yasmina, was published in 1927 and sold well. The book is based on his experiences in French Algeria, and was reprinted that year and later that year in France. He also wrote several books about his travels in Asia and the Middle East. He died in London in 1986, aged 89, and is survived by his wife and three children. He is buried in Kensington, London, with his wife, Gertrude Bell, and their three children, Josselin, Ava and Josseline, in the Kensington Jewish Cemetery, London.
He has also a son, Paul, who was born in Paris in 1892, and a daughter, Evelyn Frances Bodley. He had three brothers and two sisters, all of whom are still living in the UK. His grandfather owned a Turkish palace in Algiers, which Bodley often visited as a child. He spent three years serving in a regiment in British India where he began to write and stage plays. He considered a career in politics on the advice of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He met T. E. Lawrence outside the Paris Peace Conference and told him of his intent to move into politics. Lawrence responded furiously, calling him a moron and a traitor. When he replied that he had no other prospects now that the war was over and asked what he should do, Lawrence suggested that he should go live with the Arabs. He spoke Arabic, wore Arab dress, practised the Muslim faith and abstained from alcohol. After leaving the Sahara he practised a non-drinker and practised Arabic. At the age of 26 he was given the rank of lieutenant colonel and command of a battalion. He was appointed assistant military attaché to Paris on 15 August 1918, and attended the 1919 Paris Peace conference.
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