Twenty-four Years Without Eyebrows by Colonel Charles Augustus Makepeace

Thanks to This Re-Illuminated School of Mars: a Wordpress blog

Title: Twenty-four Years Without Eyebrows 

Author: Colonel Charles Augustus Makepeace

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: Snuff by Terry Pratchett 

Commander Sam Vimes meets Colonel Makepeace at a dinner party at the Rankin country estate. The Colonel was in the Pseudopolis Light Dragoons and spent years breeding dragons in the hope of creating a useful weapon. Lady Sybil warned him that it would be impossible to breed dragons stable enough to use in warfare but the Colonel and his colleagues went on trying. Twenty-four Years Without Eyebrows is the Colonel’s memoir. 

If you breed swamp dragons, unstable and explosive creatures at best, you really do run the risk of losing your eyebrows. Or other more important body parts. 

The Colonel still keeps a few dragons and reads the dragon fancier magazine Fang and Fire, he goes trout fishing and he is writing a second volume of memoirs. He is a thoughtful man who loves his wife but she is not a nice person.

Also mentioned in Snuff is The Vicar is Coming to Tea and One Hundred and Twenty-seven Other Warnings of Social Embarrassment by Dr Bentley Purchase (published by Unseen University Press). In the middle of the dinner party Lady Sybil uses a code as suggested by Dr Purchase to warn her husband that he is being annoying: she says she has received a letter from a Mrs Wainwright commending him highly and he must remind her to show it to him. Vimes carries on being annoying and Lady Sybil has to remind him again about Mrs Wainwright.

Thanks to the National Army Museum