Tonie Holt (10 December 1932 - 5 September 2024) and Valmai Williams Holt (born 23 December 1935), British military historians, wrote military history books and battlefield tour guides under the names Major and Mrs. Holt and pioneered the modern battlefield tour industry.
Tonie Holt was a graduate of Sandhurst Military College and was commissioned in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1953. He later earned an engineering degree from Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. Later in his British Army career, he served at the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, Worcestershire, where he worked on the mortar-locating radar “Project Cymbeline.”
Tonie Holt and Valmai Williams married in 1958. The couple had two children. They collected postcards from World War I, which led them to publish books for other collectors. After Tonie Holt's retirement, they also founded Major & Mrs Holt's Battlefield Tours in the 1980s and led tours of battlefield sites in western Europe, Gallipoli, north Africa, Italy, Crimea, the United States, Vietnam, India and the Falklands through the 1990s. When the Holts sold the company in the late 1990s, they began writing again and published guides to battlefields and books about World War I. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]