Hugh McManners is an English musician and a writer: a guitarist and songwriter, an author, and a campaigner for medical research to help war veterans.
Music
McManners writes contemporary rock and folk songs and is currently working with producer Jez Coad on an album to be released in 2021. He performs solo with acoustic guitar, and with his . He has previous experience with various bands including as singer and guitarist for The BashBand, Hugh was bass guitarist for the Leicester heavy rock band in the 1970s, and the Coventry-based reggae band Cabstars.
Life
He was born into an academic family in Oxford, the son of historian The Rev. Professor John McManners, and was brought up in Australia. He was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, Shore, Oadby Beauchamp Upper School, Magdalen College School, Oxford, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He read Geography at St Edmund Hall Oxford 1975 to 1978. McManners was bass guitarist in the Leicester heavy rock band Medusa, before serving eighteen years in the British Army. The majority of his time serving with 3 Commando Brigade. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1973 and was promoted Lieutenant in 1974 and Captain in 1979. He spent five years with 148 Commando Forward Observation Battery, as a commando, paratrooper and an army diving supervisor, and ran the British Army's jungle warfare training school in Belize. During the Falklands War in 1982 he fought with his five-man naval gunfire forward observation team, with the Special Boat Service and worked with the SAS, Throughout the war, McManners team was formally assigned to the SBS, and he was awarded a Mention in Despatches. He wrote about this in his first book . McManners then passed the year-long Army Staff College course at Camberley. He was promoted Major in 1985,and spent two years working at the Ministry of Defence in London. He has served at Fort Ord California with the US Army's 2nd Infantry Division, on counter terrorist duties in Armagh, Northern Ireland, and with the United Nations in Cyprus during the Turkish invasion of 1974. After commanding 17 Corunna Field Battery , he retired from the Army in 1989. McManners was the Defence Correspondent of The Sunday Times newspaper for five years, and also contributed to other major UK newspapers including The Observer and The Daily Telegraph also writing an article in The Independent regarding the controversial shoot to kill policy. He has co-produced a list of television documentaries and series on military subjects. He co-presented the BBC2 Bare Necessitiessurvival series and the Radio 4 series The Psychology of War. He is the author of many military books including the Scars of War, and several Dorling Kindersley titles, including the Outdoor Training Manual and the Commando Survival Guide. In 2011, with neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach, he founded at the University of Oxford's Queen's College. McManners' research into the psychological effects of military combat on participants, joined forces with Kringelbach's neuroimaging studies into how the brain functions. This led to a five-year project to compare the brains of combat veterans of similar experiences with and without combat-related PTSD. The Scars of War Foundation is developing further research into the cognitive neuroscience of combat veterans in conjunction with Prof Yair Bar-Haim of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University. McManners has recently moved back to Leicester. He writes songs, some of which reflect on his past as a soldier and his concerns and experiences with battle trauma. He performs on his own as a singer-songwriter, and with his . He has two sons.
