Jack Leacock was born in Barbados in 1918 to a family which has been there since 1634. He was educated there and at Rugby School in England (where Tom Brown had his schooldays), at Cambridge, and at the ancient Hospital of St. Bartholomew in London. He was in London during almost all of the 1939-1945 War and all the Blitz, becoming a very general surgeon. Soon after the war he returned to the West Indies where he has had lots of fun, including lots of surgery, racing single-handed dinghies, snow-skiing in Europe and North America, polo, show-jumping, hunting the fox in England and New York State, and, more recently, windsurfing. In 1955 he started to write essays for the local press. He is a confirmed sceptic.