John Edward Warmington was born in England in 1900 and was educated in Shrewsbury, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s travelling widely in Britain and Europe. In 1935 he went to live in the West Indies, settling in Barbados, where he bought land and built a house. He moved to Dominica in 1949 but returned to Barbados in 1954. Warmington was of independent means and took an interest in antiques (particularly glassware and Chinese porcelain) and genealogy as well as enjoying his extensive travels. His mother, Mrs. Mary Lily Holroyd (she had married her second husband in 1911), came to live with him in the West Indies in the late 1930s, she died there in 1944.