Respected military authors Tonie and Valmai Holt are generally acknowledged as the founders of the modern battlefield tour and have established a sound reputation for the depth of their research.
In the early 1970s they started running battlefield tours and in the 1980s they took over the running of the Royal British Legion Pilgrimages and updated them to a modern format until these were returned in-house following the re-introduction of Government grants. Later they became Military Consultants to the City of Portsmouth (at which time they suggested the building of a D-Day Museum), British Airways and Book Club Associates. In 1984 they were very involved in the creation and organisation of the first of the major Normandy re-unions and their company conducted reunion tours for many Regimental Association Groups. Eventually ‘Major and Mrs Holt’s Battlefield Tours’ covered battlefields as far apart as Viet Nam, the Falkland Islands, Egypt, Gallipoli, North Africa, America, India, Russia, South Africa and most of near-Europe, including the English Civil War. They sold that company in the 1990s.
Their Major & Mrs Holt’s Battlefield Guides series comprises without doubt the leading guide books describing the most visited battlefields of the First and Second World Wars. They have a unique combination of male and female viewpoints and can draw upon over 40 years military and travel knowledge and experience gained in personally conducting thousands of people around the areas they have written about.
Valmai Holt took a BA(Hons) in French and Spanish and taught History. Tonie Holt took a BSc(Eng) and is a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and of the Army Staff College at Camberley. They are both Fellows of the Royal Society of Arts and Science and have made frequent appearances on the lecture circuit, radio and television.
In December 2003 the Holts sponsored and unveiled a memorial to Capt Bruce Bairnsfather (the subject of their biography, In Search of the Better ‘Ole) at St Yvon near ‘Plugstreet Wood’.
In 2007 an updated edition of their biography of John Kipling, My Boy Jack?, was published to coincide with the ITV drama, My Boy Jack, starring Daniel Radcliffe and they acted as Consultants for the IWM Exhibition of the same name.
In 2008 they celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary and in 2009, the 50th Anniversary year of the death of the cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, they updated their 1978 published collection of 140 of his most enduring cartoons, The Best of Fragments from France, together with tribute cartoons by some of the world’s leading cartoonists, donated by them for a Charity Auction for Help for Heroes. All the authors’ royalties from the sale of the book go to the Charity.
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The authors at the Soissons Memorial.