Tramp Royal

There are few people who live their lives to the full and write about it. There are more than a few that have done either the former or the latter but not both.

Baronets get a bad name in fiction – scheming fortune hunters with low morals and high expenses. Well, Sir Michael Bruce 11th Baronet of Stenhouse and Airth redeems the breed. I cannot improve on the dust jacket introduction to Tramp Royal (1954).

“ ‘I cannot escape excitement. If I touch a bath heater, it blows up. If I go swimming, I am carried away by the tide. If I go into a restaurant which has had a blameless reputation for 100 years, someone chooses that day to shoot himself at a table. If I go on a yacht it sinks. I am a sensational newspaper reporter who has missed his vocation.’

In these words Sir Michael, 11th Bt of Stenhouse and Airth, a descendant of Robert the Bruce and of the Royal Stuarts, sums up his life of adventure across the world.

In sixty years he has crammed into his life a variety of thrilling experiences. At seventeen he shot his first man; at eighteen he hunted a double-murderer across Rhodesia;  by the time he was twenty-four he had fought at Gallipoli and through the Great War of 1914-1918. He sailed round the Horn in a windjammer; fought in a revolution; walked across the Andes; defeated a group of unscrupulous rogues to save a friend’s business; was nearly killed in a stampede of wild cattle; was the sole survivor of a gold-seeking hunt in the Amazon; and rescued Jews from the clutches of Hitler.”

I’m lucky to have a first edition signed by Sir Michael but you can buy a second hand copy for less than a fiver.