John’s sister Daphne Forde in her memoir A Stick called Will records how the class system in the Army continued to operate, even in wartime:

‘So John started life [after beginning his training for the Guards] each day at 5.30 a.m. and drilled and polished, cleaned and ironed, then drilled some more. So punctilious did he become about his appearance and his uniform that after ironing razor-sharp pleats into the back of his greatcoat, when returning to barracks from a weekend leave, he would stand all the way in the train, rather than crease this masterpiece of uniform perfection. By the end of six months he qualified for his commission, passing out with flying colours, but here came the rub. Despite the war, despite the fact that he had done well, he did not possess a private income and without that he wasn’t eligible to be an officer in the Guards Regiment. Amazing! It was an accepted fact that pre-war, a private income was required for any officer wishing to make the Army his career, but it came as a shock now to find that it applied in the Guards, even in wartime.’

(Forde, D. 1998, A Stick called Will: 45)

In 1941, instead of becoming an officer in the Guards, he received a commission as an officer in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. The battalion arrived in Singapore just three weeks before the Japanese invasion.

In his years as a POW, John also moved away from far right political views which had previously seen him associated before the war with The Right Club and with figures such as the novelist and Fascist sympathiser Henry Williamson and Churchill’s controversial nephew Captain Pitt Rivers.3 The Right Club was a secret group formed by the former Scottish MP Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay. John was attracted to Henry Williamson’s vision of a self-sufficient rural life and interested in his Fascist philosophy. He went briefly in the late 1930s to work on Williamson’s farm in Norfolk; although they corresponded for some time, their friendship was brief and Williamson was ambivalent about John’s capacity to labour as a farm hand. He features in Williamson’s The Story of A Norfolk Farm (1986), in which he is called ‘The Inquiline’, and in The Phoenix Generation (Volume 12 of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight) where he features as ‘Hurst’. Interestingly, John later bought a second home in Norfolk, which is where he eventually ended his days. He was also involved in the film production of Tarka the Otter based on Williamson’s novel.