Author

Philip James Day is an award winning documentary filmmaker, and investigative journalist. Over a career spanning more than three decades he has produced and directed nearly 300 hours of television for broadcasters including the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, PBS and Channel Four (UK). 

His work has received major industry recognition, including a Peabody Award and two Emmy Awards.

Empire’s Witness began when Day discovered the wartime diary of his grandfather, Corporal Alwyn Robinson Day, a British Army clerk for the engineering unit REME. He served across Africa, India and the Middle East during the Second World War. 

Drawing on the author's experience of investigative stories, he used the diary alongside convoy records and archival sources to reconstruct both the life of the grandfather he barely knew and the wider wartime world through which he travelled.