From: mig73allenford2002@yahoo.co.uk   
      
   Major Tonie Holt, who has died aged 91, was, with his wife Valmai, a   
   pioneer of the modern battlefield touring industry.   
      
   It started with their collection of postcards from the First World War,   
   which became Picture Postcards of the Golden Age: A Collector’s Guide   
   (1971). Two more books followed and with Till the Boys Come Home: The   
   Picture Postcards of the First World War (1977), and The Best of   
   Fragments from France by Capt Bruce Bairnsfather (1978, edited by the   
   Holts) they found a gap in the publishing market. Like many of the   
   Holts’ subsequent publications, these have rarely been out of print.   
      
   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/09/24/major-tonie-ho   
   t-pioneer-battlefield-tours-war-graves/   
      
   When in partnership with their first publishers, Purnell & Sons, they   
   decided to lead a tour of Great War battlefields in order to promote   
   their books, they also found a gap in the tourism industry.   
      
   Major & Mrs Holt’s Battlefield Tours was the first commercial   
   battlefield tour operator in the world. Over the next four decades they   
   and their expert guides led groups to sites on the Normandy beaches,   
   Arnhem, Vietnam, Gallipoli, the Dambusters’ Raid, the sites of American   
   Civil War, South Africa, Colditz, Crete, Tunisia, and Egypt, and in the   
   1990s were among the first British tour operators in Crimea.   
      
   The Royal British Legion’s head of Remembrance Travel, Colonel Piers   
   Storie-Pugh, recalled that “with his expert eye for detail, the ability   
   to bring the historical past to life and his engaging personality Tonie   
   was the most consummate battlefield tour operator.”   
      
   Naturally understated and generous with his time, whether through his   
   commercial tours or by his quiet philanthropic work, Holt helped   
   thousands to undertake pilgrimages to the graves of friends and   
   families.   
      
   Whenever possible they visited Commonwealth War Graves Commission   
   cemeteries and memorials, and encouraged veterans and their families to   
   attend remembrance services such as the Menin Gate on November 11 each   
   year, to keep alive what they regarded as the true spirit of Armistice   
   Day.   
      
   Tonie Holt was born on December 10 1932 in Portsmouth, where his father   
   was serving as a Royal Marines musician, and educated at Sir Roger   
   Manwood’s grammar school. There he excelled in the CCF, was a school   
   prefect and won his colours for hockey.   
      
   Holt attended the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, where he played   
   hockey for the Army, and having gained a BSc (Eng) was commissioned into   
   the Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers in September 1953.   
      
   After service in Germany, and further study at the Army staff college   
   and the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, Holt and his   
   wife, a former head girl at Dover Grammar School for Girls, decided   
   there was another life to be had besides soldering in peacetime and he   
   resigned his regular commission. They had both begun writing at their   
   schools, and their first published works were for local newspapers and   
   then for local, commercial radio.   
      
   In 1984, when the Royal British Legion needed a pilgrimage organiser,   
   Storie-Pugh turned to the Holts. This blossomed into the government’s   
   war widows’ grant-in-aid scheme, operated by the RBL under Storie-Pugh   
   with guidance from the Holts, which funded war widows and ex-POWs to   
   travel overseas to pay their respects to their families and comrades.   
      
   Holt was also the driving force behind the campaign to save “Toc H”   
   (Talbot House) in Poperinge, Belgium, and championed the preservation as   
   a memorial of Lochnagar, a mine crater south of the village of La   
   Boisselle which was blown up on July 1 1916 at the start of the Battle   
   of the Somme and where now a religious service is held each year.   
      
   He lent his weight to the creation of a museum at Pegasus Bridge over   
   the Caen Canal at Ouistreham in Normandy, and is indirectly responsible   
   for the other museums and hotels that have sprung up across Europe and   
   in Turkey as a result of the burgeoning industry which the trailblazing   
   Holt started.   
      
   Having sold the company, which became Holts Tours, in the late 1990s the   
   Holts continued to write and update a score of bestselling and   
   award-winning guidebooks, doing all their own research, travelling all   
   the routes they recommend, visiting all the memorials and cemeteries,   
   and taking all the photographs.   
      
   Arguably, however, their finest books were two biographies: My Boy   
   Jack?: The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998) about John Kipling, the   
   only son of Rudyard Kipling, missing in action in September 1915, and   
   The Biography of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather (2000), a cartoonist of the   
   First World War.   
      
   The Holts also indirectly gave birth to a subgenre of shipborne cruise   
   lecturers, which provided employment for retired Royal Navy and Army   
   officers, impecunious academics and would-be authors. Anxious to   
   professionalise their business, in 2001 Holt became a founding patron of   
   the Guild of Battlefield Guides.   
      
   In 1958 Holt married Valmai Williams, whom he nursed through a long   
   illness, and who survives him with their son and daughter.   
      
   Major Tonie Holt, born December 10 1932, died September 5 2024   
      
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