Percival James Bothwell was an Englishman who joined the British Army as a young man and was posted to India, where he would settle and start a family.
During the First World War, he gained a commission with the British Indian Army.
He seems to have been a sober man, with a vocation for service. These qualities led him to the Young Men’s Christian Association, with whom he served at Chanak, then various posts in Protestant denominations and congregations.
Bothwell seems rarely to have stayed in one spot for long, and indeed shifted from one hemisphere to another in 1927, taking his young family to the Antipodes. They spent time in a multitude of towns across New Zealand and Australia, although Bothwell would live out his life in Sydney.
A biography of the author is included as an appendix in our edition of In Chanak with the British Army.
