P S Allfree

P.S. Allfree, who was educated at Bedford School, enlisted in the ranks in the Army in 1948 when he was seventeen. The next year he went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and after being commissioned in the Infantry served in Libya, Egypt and Arabia. His experiences in the last named as an officer of the Trucial Oman Levies from 1954 to 1955 and later from 1957 to 1962, when he was in the Sultan of Muscat and Oman's Army, were the subject of his first book, Warlords of Oman. In between...See more

P.S. Allfree, who was educated at Bedford School, enlisted in the ranks in the Army in 1948 when he was seventeen. The next year he went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and after being commissioned in the Infantry served in Libya, Egypt and Arabia. His experiences in the last named as an officer of the Trucial Oman Levies from 1954 to 1955 and later from 1957 to 1962, when he was in the Sultan of Muscat and Oman's Army, were the subject of his first book, Warlords of Oman. In between these two periods he had what he describes as a 'brief aberration' as an unsuccessful student-pilot in the RAF. After leaving the Sultan's Army he served as a political officer in the East Aden Protectorate and his experiences there are the subject of Hawks of the Hadhramaut. Late in 1963 Mr Allfree went to Kenya where, after a brief period running a tourist lodge in a game park, he took up an appointment on the editorial staff of Kenya Weekly News. Mr Allfree died in 2006, aged seventy-five. See less