Frederic Manning was born in Sydney in 1882. In 1903 he joined Arthur Galton, a former tutor and lifelong friend, in his English vicarage, and set out on a literary career, publishing polite poetry, essays, reviews and stories.

His subsequent experience in the army and in the appalling trench warfare at the Somme and at Ancre informed his great novel The Middle Parts of Fortune which was anonymously published in 1929. Stripped of the profanities of Manning’s ‘fine fuckin mob’ of soldiers, an expurgated edition appeared in 1930 under the title Her Privates We. It became an immediate besteseller. Frederic Manning died in England in 1935.