60980: Extracts from "Things heard, seen and remembered" unpublished memoirs of Lt. Col. Justin Hooper
These are extracts from "Things heard, seen and remembered" by Lt. Col. Justin Hooper (born 6/9/1898 “ died 20/5/1991).
Penny Lee [Hooper's daughter] explains that her father wrote this memoir "late in his 80s, and of his own admission it shows himself to have been very young, brash and over-keen, simply unaware of how those who had served and survived through those terrible times must have welcomed the end of hostilities. He always told me that he was alive simply because he had so wanted to be a professional soldier, so had the longer training and arrived late."
Born 1898 in Burma. Justin Hooper attended Cheltenham College in about 1912 (pp15) where he was study-orderly for a prefect Wogan-Browne (Wogan-Browne served in the army during the First World War but was killed soon afterwards at the Curragh, Ireland, by mistake, by the Sinn Fein).
These extracts include:
* The declaration of war 1914 (pp16),
* being in the OTC at college (pp18),
* the decision to obtain a regular commission which led to his delay in joining up (pp18), and receiving a white feather on the Promenade in Cheltenham (pp19),
* the army entrance examinations (pp19-20),
* to Royal Military Academy, Woolwich for a full year's training in 1917 (pp20-21),
* dropping his rifle on parade and the punishment (pp21),
* passing out and going over to France August 1918 (pp22),
* meeting an American sergeant called Roosevelt - of the famous family (pp22),
* and finally taking command of a section of the 66th East Lancashire (pp22-23),
* his servant - Gunner Alfred Birtwhistle (pp23-24),
* taking ammunition up to the front lines (pp24),
* travelling across France by railway with his battery to the Cambrai sector, including a train crash (pp 25-26),
* and to join 'D' Battery 330 Field Brigade of 4.5" howitzers (pp27),
* hearing of the Amristice 11 November 1918 (pp27) and finding a dead column of British infantry killed only a few days earlier (pp27-28),
* demobilisation for others and in 1919 posting to Egypt en route to Palestine for Hooper (pp31).
