'A Grandfather's Tale: Memoirs being mainly concerned with service in the Indian Army and the Indian Political Service in India and the Persian Gulf from 1932-1947' [‎7r] (13/118)

, The i ^ cr ®f se iri numbers between the 120 odd cadets with whom I
passea into ^nanurst and the 230 plus with whom I passed out was accounted
for by Army "A" Caaets sent to the College from the ranks, cadets from
India and.a^so ^rom various foreign countries, including some from China.
In my senior term I had a Chinese in my section and have no doubt he became
a genera^ as soon as he returned to China!
^ was commissioned on the 28th January 1932, when I was nineteen-
an -a-half, and sailed for India from Southampton in the troooship Neuralia
on the I 2 th February 1932, I was orderly officer on the night that we went
througn tne ^ay ox oiscay. ^ Luckily I am a good sailor myself but the scenes
on tne uroop decks curing that very rough passage were beyond description.
Cn the whole, tnough, we had a very good voyage, calling at Malta, Port Said,
or du an and Aden en route, and finally reaching Bombay on March 5th 1932.
Tnre f of us, John Morton, John L e Mee Power and I were destined to spend our
ll &r t ° the 2nd.Bn. ^The Border Regt. (Cumberland and Westmoreland)
tne oxd.55th Foot, xhen stationed at Rawalpindi in the Northern Punjab. As
txhe senior of the three I had to send a telegram stating the anticipated
time of arrival in Pindi. Unfortunately I had been told the journey would take
thr ee days, whereas it took two, and we were not too welcome when we arrived*
a day early, and nothing much seemed to have been done to arrange for our
quarters. I found.myself given a room in Old Brigade Headquarters, which
had been recently inhabited by a buffalo, and there were inches deep of
filth on tne floor. It took my newly acquired and very excellent bearer
Noor Khan and various other odd bodies an hour or so to clean it out, and
make it habitable. Looking back I think it was without doubt the worst
quarter I ever had in India, but luckily we marched up to Gharial in the
Murree Hills some six weeks.later, and never returned to Victoria Barracks
again.
i had asked po oe posted to Rawalpindi, which was the Aldershot of
India in those days, as I knew there were the 5th and 6 th Gurkhas at
Abbottabad, not too far off, and I was determined to join a Gurkha Regiment.
All I had read and heard about Gurkhas made me feel they must be the best
soldiers in the world. They had all the British troops' virtues and most,
out not all, of their vices, and they were wholly dedicated soldiers,
whereas in peacetime the British troop was always saying "Roll on seven
years" which was the term of his active engagement. I knew nothing of the
Border Regiment before I joined it for that first year. It had had a
number of officers transferred to it from disbanded Irish Regiments (Connaught
Rangers and Dublin Fusiliers) after the establishemnt of txhe Irish Free
State in 192^ and in consequence had a most appalling promotion block.
The senior subaltern had 18-| years' service, and, in 1932 there were still
half-a-dozen who had served in the 1914-18 War. The Senior Captain, who
had the D.S.O.,M.B.E., M.C. had 26-J years' service. (Time Scale promotion
was not introduced into the British Army until 1938). In consequence it
was not a very happy battalion. The C.O. was a very fine soldier but had
oeen badly wounded in the war, in the head and right arm, and had an uncertain