Multi award-winning author and former Gulf War prisoner John Nichol is taking to the road this month to tell the story of the Unknown Warrior who, interred at Westminster Abbey, represents the countless soldiers who lost their lives in WWI without a grave.

A personal journey of discovery and remembrance, John's theatre tour explores the concepts of sacrifice, camarderie and remembrance, as he explains here... 

Tell us about your first-ever live tour, The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance.
I will be telling the incredible story of how the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior came about in the aftermath of the First World War in 1920, when over one million British Empire soldiers had been killed, with over half a million having no known grave.
There will be recreations of battle, emotive music and readings from the old letters from those who were there at the time. I’ll also be using accounts from people that I've met, people who can help us understand what it was like back then. I'll be able to help people grasp what the tomb in Westminster Abbey means - how just one man came to represent hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers. I don't want to say it will be educational because that sounds like something from school, but it'll certainly be enlightening, entertaining and enthralling.

Are you nervous about doing your first-ever live tour ? 
I always say this about going up on stage to speak at a big conference: if you're not nervous, there's a damn good chance that you won't put on a good show. But I will be even more nervous than usual on this tour as I've never done anything like this before.

What else will the show feature?
We will recreate a sense of time and place during the war - what it was like to be in the trenches and to go into battle. We will also recreate the atmosphere of that day on the 11th of November 1920 when the Unknown Warrior’s coffin was paraded through the streets of London. That visual storytelling will really come to the fore.

What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
I hope they will be enthralled, entertained and enlightened in the same way I was when I discovered  this astonishing story. My hope is that people go away at the end saying: “Wow, that was an amazing story. I really learned something, and I was really entertained for two hours.”

You're also a motivational speaker...
Yes. I love it because you get to meet some incredibly interesting people. I've done everything from speaking in a small room to four of the most senior people in insurance, to giving a speech to 7000 people in New Zealand. Motivational speaking is a huge privilege, but I still feel like an imposter. Whenever I see my name on the bestseller list, or somebody wants to do an interview with me, or someone says, “We're going to start selling theatre tickets for your show,” I feel like an imposter. I have done ever since getting commissioned!

What do you talk about in your motivational speeches?
I tell the story of my Gulf War - what happened to me when I was faced with incredible adversity.  People find this very exciting and enthralling. It gets them going and they have their hands over their mouths when I tell them some of the brutal bits, or the moments where I nearly died. But there are some really quite humorous bits in there also. I'm not a comedian, but there are some quite funny aspects about being shot down, captured and tortured. Honestly.

So, what are the funny elements that you talk about?
There are a number. For instance, when John Peters and I were shot down, the first thing we had to do was activate a location device that sends a signal and gives your colleagues your position. But when I pulled the handle to activate it, an orange life jacket inflated around my neck, so I'm standing in the desert wearing a life jacket. We also had a survival pack which had basic things in it - food, location flares, water etc... It also contained less useful desert survival stuff, like an axe and a fishing line! To get into the pack you had to pull a handle on the side. When I did this a day-glow orange sea dinghy inflated in the desert. That was like having a band of the Royal Marines parading up and down, advertising your position!

Tell us about how you joined the RAF
We were a family of six living in a council house. I was lucky enough to go to a grammar school, and I got eight O Levels. I was expected to stay on and do A Levels and go to uni. I would have been the first in the family, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to get out and experience the world. I'd always been interested in electronics - batteries, bulbs, magnets... I was building burglar alarms when I was 12 years old. and loved it. I had Meccano sets, electrical sets, chemistry sets. I applied for 40 or 50 apprenticeships and got an interview in Newcastle for the Central Electricity Generating Board. As I was waiting for the bus home, I was standing outside the RAF careers office and I noticed they had glossy brochures. My brother was in the Air Force, so I knew a little bit about it, but I'd never thought about joining myself. I picked up a glossy brochure and took it home to read. I thought, “This might be for me.”  and that was it. I joined as an electronics technician. Four years later, I applied for a commission to be an officer as I wanted to be a pilot, but I wasn't good enough for that. So, I trained as a Tornado navigator, and the rest, as they say, is history.

You were incredibly brave when you and your colleague John Peters were shot down and captured during the Gulf War in 1991. What are your memories of that now?
It was traumatic, there’s no doubt about that. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But I would probably question the concept of bravery because to be brave, you have to do something extra in the face of adversity. And I didn't do anything extra. I had adversity meted upon me for seven weeks. It was pretty hideous adversity, but I didn't do anything brave. To be brave you have to have a choice to do something different. I've met a lot of truly brave people who have won some of our nation’s highest awards for valour - The Victoria Cross, The George Cross, The Military Cross, things like that. So, I would say that I didn't do anything brave.

How did you get through seven weeks of being subjected to the most appalling treatment?
I'm not trying to be a smart here, but my response to that is, “How do you not get through it?” What choice did I have? What else could I have done when I was being beaten with rubber hoses or when they were stubbing cigarettes out on my ears or stuffing burning paper down the back of my neck? What is the mechanism for ‘giving up’? When I was held in in the Mukhabarat (the secret police) headquarters for four weeks, I don't think I saw another person. It was a hideous experience. I was starving - well, I was a bit tubby back then, so starving would have taken me quite a long time! But I think I lost three stone in seven weeks. When I came back to Cyprus and had my medical, the doctor said to me, “You’re still a little bit overweight, so you'll need to get a few more pounds off!” So, when all of those hideous things were happening, I had no choice but to exist amidst adversity. I didn't cope. I just existed. It was truly awful, but I didn't actually do anything brave. Or even interesting.

Do you still feel animosity towards your captors?
No. I never did, not for one single second. They were just doing their job. We were bombing their country. We were killing their friends. They were brutal, and they broke some of the rules of war or humanity. When we were kept by the Mukhabarat, that was pretty brutal, and when we were held in Abu Ghraib prison, that was hideous beyond compare. Some of the guards were truly evil people. But the Iraqis as a whole were not an evil people. I can imagine that if an Iraqi jet had been shot down, after bombing our air base and killing me and my mates, the engineers who looked after our aircraft and the teams who protected us would have been mightily cheesed off. So, I had no animosity towards the Iraqis whatsoever.

How did you recover from such a severe trauma? 
Being a Geordie who enjoyed a few pints, my concept of recovering was going straight back to my mates and having one quiet beer followed by 15 extremely loud ones. I just wanted to get on with my life. In the immediate aftermath, you don't have any post-traumatic stress disorder. You just want to get home. But the RAF, to my intense annoyance, said, “You're not going home. We're holding you in Cyprus with our medical and psychiatric teams.” I railed against this. We had an RAF Wing Commander, who, incidentally, went on to look after John McCarthy, Terry Waite and many others. He was an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he was a senior officer, I stood toe to toe with him and said, “This is ridiculous, Sir. I'm only doing this because you're ordering me to.” But he was right. It wasn't until many years later that I realised how badly I'd been affected.

And how did that traumatic time change your life?
It’s a Sliding Doors moment. I don't know what I would be doing if I hadn't been shot down. And it's not just the shooting down because there were several people captured. It was being paraded on TV - those famous pictures that were flashed around the world of me and John Peters as prisoners on Iraqi TV. That was the worst moment of my life. It was a source of shame. It was a source of humiliation.

I felt I had let the side down. It brought me to literal tears. I cried. But if I had not been shot down and paraded on TV, I don't know what I would have been doing, but I guess I wouldn't have been doing this - writing books and preparing for a nationwide theatre tour. I wouldn't be married to the lady sitting on the patio working in the sun outside. I wouldn't have my wonderful daughter just getting ready to go out. I wouldn't have the dog wandering around. I wouldn't be on my 19th book. None of those things would have happened. Being paraded on TV is still the worst moment of my life. But nothing that I do today would have come about if that hadn’t happened, and that's quite curious to think about.

Looking back on your life, what conclusions do you draw?
My dad worked in the Vickers tank works in Newcastle for 40 years. So, I can't really complain about sitting at my desk in a lovely office on a sunny day with my dog wandering in and out. It's not really a job, is it? I joined the RAF when I was 16 in 1981, and since then I've never had a proper job where you clock in at eight in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. Sometimes it's required some hard work, and it's been dangerous, but it's never been a proper, normal job. I've loved it all!

And you've remained very level-headed about your success...
There’s no doubt about it, it’s nice when people say, “I see you are back in the bestseller list,” or all these very senior people in an engineering company or an insurance company stand up and clap you at the end of a speech. But I know full well that it could finish at any time. You only have to mess up once, and that's it.
I've always said this since leaving the RAF: if something doesn’t work, whether that's writing books, or theatre tours, I'll go and do something else. I’m very aware that it could all stop tomorrow.   
Actually, it probably couldn't stop tomorrow because this tour is already planned. There would be a lot of disgruntled punters if I didn’t turn up!

John Nichol: The Unknown Warrior shows at Stourbridge Town Hall on Friday 4 October; Royal Spa Centre, Leamington Spa, Thurs 10 October; Swan Theatre, Worcester, Wed 23 October; Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, Sunday 3 November