The guide directory details all those Accredited Members who have chosen to advertise their expertise and services as guides on the Guild website. Each of these has passed our Accreditation Programme in which they have demonstrated the skills needed for us to say that they are high-quality guides who will give you a great tour.
You can filter by battle/campaign or country and then click on the name of an Accredited Guide to read their biography. Most Accredited Guides have contact details by which you can contact them directly. If not, or if you want to pass a message to them, please contact them via the Guild Secretary via our Contacts Page.
Many Guides can develop bespoke personalised tours and can research where particular ancestors might have fought or died. If you want to advice on following a particular ancestor and you have not identified a particular Accredited Guide, please contact the Guild Secretary. We guarantee we’ll have somebody that can help you!
Please note, the Guild does not recommend or endorse any of the commercial products or companies of the members listed below. We are not responsible for checking that those listed below have complied with the relevant legislation or regulations in the jurisdictions they are based or guide in. Many are members of ETOA or other local guiding associations and some have a local permit to work with children or vulnerable adults. But it is your responsibility to ensure they meet all the criteria you need for them to work with your group.
Finally, this list shows only our Accredited Guides. Our Ordinary Members are not listed here and if you would like to check whether a particular individual is a member of the Guild, or for any other further help, please contact the Guild Secretary via our Contacts Page.
Some of our Accredited Guides have experience of researching military aspects of family history, and may be able to assist with your genealogical enquiries. A list of those members is here; if you would like to seek their assistance, contact details can be found by selecting their profile from those shown on this page.
Frank Baldwin
Accredited Guide Number: 8
I am a freelance guide, historian and heritage professional. After retiring following ten years in the army as a Royal Artillery Officer, I became increasingly involved in interpreting and presenting battlefield heritage for the Battlefields Trust and The Royal British Legion. My interest in battlefield touring was triggered by noticing that the part of Germany in which we were training in the 1980s had been a battlefield in 1757. I had always been interested in military history and both my father and grandfather had fought in the world wars.
As a guide, my clients include small and large groups, businesses as well as educational and military groups. I was an early supporter of the Guild of Battlefield Guides and been part of its validation team, responsible for assessing guides’ competence, since 2008. I instruct on courses teaching battlefield guides and have been Guide Co-ordinator for the Liberation Route Europe.
In 2012 I was elected to the British Commission for Military History. My published work includes two books on D Day and Normandy, chapters in British Army Guide to the Western Front, and articles in military history journals. I write a military history blog https://theobservationpost.com
My interest and knowledge of military history stretches from Caesar to the Cold War and my guiding experience covers much of Europe. Besides the world wars and the Napoleonic era, I am also interested in the mid C19th wars between Prussia, Austria and France and the Severn Years War.
Two of my books are on artillery in Normandy and I am currently writing a battlefield guide to artillery on the First Day of the Somme in publication. The artillery story of both world wars is a little neglected and I offer battlefield tours to tell the artillery story under the brand www.gunnertours.com
One speciality is providing military background for people researching their ancestry. I have been a researcher for a company that makes a popular ancestry-based TV programme and have appeared on television myself.
I have been privileged to support some of the British Army centenary staff rides as a subject matter expert alongside academic historians. My clients include many military units and headquarters. I run a website offering advice to military units planning staff rides, battlefield studies or realities of war tours. www.staffrideservices.com
The links between military and business strategy fascinate me. I offer a service to help organisations to learn from other people’s mistakes using examples from statecraft and military history. www.businessbattlefields.com
I chaired the Battlefields Trust from 2008-2015 and was involved in many projects to preserve, interpret and present many of the Battlefields of Britain, including the re-discovery of the battlefields of Bosworth.
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Ewan Carmichael
Accredited Guide Number: 84
Ewan’s particular interests are Leadership, the Realities of War and Close Combat, through the ages, but particularly the ‘horse and musket’ era. On tour, he believes in balancing depth of research with enjoyment.
He is a direct successor to Wellington’s McGrigor as Director General Army Medical Services. He set up and led the British Army’s Air Assault Medical Regiment and then commanded all of the Army’s Field Hospitals operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was awarded an MBE for Squadron leadership in the First Gulf War and CBE for his direction of the Army Medical Services (AMS), at a time when the AMS achieved its highest battle casualty survival rate in history (halving the death rate).
A graduate of the Army Staff College and member of the Royal College of Defence Studies, his MA was on whether it is possible to create a strategy which endures. A Fellow of one of the Medical Royal Colleges, he is also an Apothecary and Freeman of the City of London.
Gregarious rather than combative by nature, he was surprised to be elected as President of the Combined Services Martial Arts Society by its members, and even more pleasantly surprised to win the first Worldwide Open tournament for renaissance sword & buckler at Hanover in 2010.
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Tim Pritchard-Barrett
Accredited Guide Number: 71
Advance Battlefield Tours mission Statement is: To create and deliver – private, corporate & school tours which will entertain, educate, inform, teach, to even test individuals or groups of any size, tailored to any level of complexity, with any style of accommodation, over any length of time.
Our tours are delivered with care, great flexibility, knowledge, clarity, understanding, humour & unbridled enthusiasm for client needs & subject matter! Therefore we want you to “Smell that black powder & taste the cordite! “
Tim followed his family tradition and was commissioned into the Welsh Guards in 1974, where he served in every theatre upon which the regiment partook for nine years.
He has served for a total of 29 years. After the “regular” army Tim continued with the Territorial Army; – (similar to the US National Guard), in The Queens Own Yeomanry (A cavalry regiment in the role of deep penetration, armoured reconnaissance) up to the appointment of Squadron Leader but later as a staff officer, second in command and training officer for other regiments. His experiences in the military have included both operational command and staff appointments.
He been a member of the International Guild of Battlefield Guides since 2007, and holds Badge number 71. Widely experienced and well read, as a professional Battlefield Guide, Tim has led many dozens of tours across Western, Southern and Central Europe; (the majority, small business and personal tours) for 18 years.
New recent additions are the mystical secret Suffolk coast’s military heritage and the vast array of USAAF 8th Air Force Bases across East Anglia with the “Masters of the Air” Series having been on Apple TV.
All these tours have consistently reviewed Politics, Strategic aims, Operational Requirements, Ego, Command, Control, Intelligence (Gathering, Interpretation, Analysis & Dissemination), Leadership, Morale, Training, Weaponry, Logistics, Ground and Conditions. Most of all, to ensure a clarity of message and understanding to the tour participants, no matter their previous knowledge.
Always keen to research something new, Tim welcomes the challenge of conducting new tours, for forgotten wars, to unsung places.
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Dr. Christopher L. Scott
Accredited Guide Number: 5
Christopher Scott has been walking battlefields for over 40 years. He has guided parties around the sites of Medieval, Civil War, Marlburian and Napoleonic battles and was a trustee of the Battlefield Trust and The Guild of Battlefield Guides. He is also a member of the British Commission for Miltary History and the Royal Historical Society. He did his doctorate on the 17th century militia at Cranfield University, part of the Defence Academy, with Richard Holmes and he is well published with ten battle books to his credit; his new interpretation of Roundway Down was released in late 2018. Early in his career he worked in theatre then schools as a drama teacher. Later in Education he led departments then faculty teams, and helped set up and manage a Further Education College. As Director of Education for The Royal Armouries he designed the education and public interaction programmes for the Tower of London, Fort Nelson and Leeds Museums. Away from work he is a re-enactor who commanded the Parliamentarian Army for the Roundhead Association; he is a theatre director, wargamer and stamp collector.
Currently Chris is a trustee of the Museum of Military Medicine and writing the story for the projected new museum in Cardiff Bay. He is also a freelance battlefield guide, lecturer, consultant and writer; he is also a good storyteller and won the Cameron Mackintosh Contemporary Playwright Award.
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Allan Wood
Accredited Guide Number: 66
Allan served for 22 years in the Regular Army in the 17th/21st Lancers and Queens Royal Lancers, a career which ended at the Armoured Fighting Vehicle Gunnery School, Lulworth. Allan was later commissioned into the TA serving for a further 9 years firstly with the Dorset and later the Royal Wessex Yeomanry in Bovington where he began guiding battlefield tours.
Allan’s first battlefield tour as a guide was for the Yeomanry to Normandy in 1999. He has since guided nearly 200 battlefield tours for both Regular and Territorial Army units, schools and numerous adult groups to the Western Front, North West Europe plus other campaigns outside of the two World Wars including Waterloo and Agincourt. Allan has guided many ANZAC focused tours of the Western Front, 1916-1918. Allan retired from teaching to give himself the time to be an active Battlefield Guide and works freelance for several companies and organisations. Allan also regularly gives talks on Military History to a wide variety of audiences from those including very senior serving officers to local groups in the Dorset area and wider afield.
Allan is an Accredited Member of (Badge Number 66) of the International Guild of Battlefield Guides and a current Validator for candidates on the Path to their own Badge. He is a member of the Western Front Association, Royal Lancers Regimental Association and a Trustee for the Dorset Yeomanry Association.
Allan is an Alumnus of the Duke of York’s Royal Military School, Dover. Whilst in the Army he studied and graduated through the Open University, later training as teacher at the University of Bath after which he taught History in a secondary school in Poole. Allan was later appointed as the Headteacher of the Compass, the school responsible for providing Alternative Provision for young people in Weymouth, Dorset. Allan still lives in Weymouth with his wife Angela, who tolerates both his guiding and golf in exchange for holidays in the sun! They have two grown up children.
ANZACS on the Western FrontAdvance to VictoryAgincourt...
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Marc Yates
Accredited Guide Number: 90
I was born and brought up in Jersey, Channel Islands and from an early age became passionate about its history.
My maternal grandfather, apart from serving from 1914 to 1919 with the Canadian Infantry on the Western Front, held the government position of Guardien of Gorey Castle for 25 years. He was responsible on a day to day basis for Gorey Castle, which is an 800-year-old ancient monument, and he acted as a guide to its many visitors from members of the Royal Family to French day-trippers. He taught me after he retired, without me knowing at the time that I would effectively follow his footsteps, how accurate history and humour make for the best tours.
With both of my paternal great-grandfather and grandfather being career soldiers and seeing service in both World Wars, it was inevitable that military history would help form my interests and I even contemplated a military career myself. However, that didn’t happen, and I followed a career as a lawyer for 35 years.
I got into guiding accidentally as a result of our law firm entertaining some visiting conference lawyers on a coach tour. I thought that the “pre-taped” commentary was so bad that I grabbed the microphone and gave my first guided tour! I did it again when we next had visiting clients and then again for a big family birthday coach tour. Then came a family “pilgrimage” back to the Western Front which I researched with the assistance of my grandfather’s battalion’s war diary and his 90-page military record (the Canadian ones are very full and now are all online) and by then I realised that once I had finished practising as a lawyer, there was another career!
I set up Jersey Military Tours (and its sister brand, History Alive!) in 2016 and I focus on providing personal service for small groups, although I am happy to guide larger parties. I believe in providing a complete experience to my clients to help them get the best of their exploration of a battlefield or fortress. This generally involves getting to know individual participants through their stories, the impact on them and the local population, as well as introducing other disciplines like archaeology and geology to better understand the topography.
I particularly enjoy the educational element of battlefield guiding – be it for individual clients, a class of school children or a military unit undertaking a conceptual study exercise. My mother was a teacher, so I suppose that is where I get that from!
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