John Windsor attended the Royal Military College and was an officer in Lord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians). Unable to get any eastern Canadian publishers interested in his memoir about his struggle to adjust to his disability after he was totally blinded during WW II, John Windsor discussed his problem with retired Alberta rancher Gray Campbell who had moved to Sidney on Vancouver Island. Campbell published Windsor's Blind Date (Gray's Publishing, 1962; 1963) using a down payment of $250 won in a CBC-TV show called Live A Borrowed Life, forerunner to Front Page Challenge. With a foreword by Major-General the Honourable George Pearkes, VC and an introduction by Lord Fraser of Lonsdale, Blind Date was the first book from Gray's Publishing and led to the growth of the B.C.'s main commercial publishing house during the 1960s. Windsor also published Nowhere Else to Go: "The Man Behind the Scenes" (Gray's Publishing, 1964), a biography of Jerry Gosley of the Smile Show.

The name John Windson is also cited as the author of Night Drop at Ede (1982), the story of Saanich resident Len Mulholland who was a hero in World War II as a Dutch resistance fighter in the service of the British.

[BCBW 2005] "Publishing" "War"