My Father: A Cavalry Soldier of the Great War 1914-1918
by
Clifford H. (Jumbo) Partridge
Royal Air Force and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The picture here with Paula was taken on Anzac Day 26 April 2013. Beyond my uncle Garrett’s (Canadian) Great War medals on my right breast, I am now wearing for the first time, my own father’s.
It is interesting how I came by them. My father died when I was 14 months old so I can’t remember him at all, but I knew he had served in the Middle East in the Debyshire Yeomanry. I had always understood that his medals had been lost or taken by a relative. Anyway, my brother Harold died aged 90 earlier this year and after his death his son told me that after Harold’s house was sold, the new owners had found some medals in the loft. He said he would send them to me although I thought he was really entitled to keep them.
When they arrived they were still in the original packet, obviously just as received. The little registered packet was stamped on the back “Cavalry Records Office, Canterbury, 10 Feb 1922”. It really was weird to be unpacking them and getting them mounted after 91 years. There was a picture of him and some of his mates wearing topees in Salonika in 1917 or 1918 with his writing on the back. The only specimen of his handwriting I have ever seen.I knew that Canterbury Cathedral was the home church of the cavalry but never before thought they would have their own records office there. Do you know if there are barracks there and any other connection?
Editor’s note: I now live near Canterbury with its magnificent Cathedral, and I have been able to tell Jumbo that the sites of the former infantry, artillery and cavalry barracks are identifiable from old maps found on the internet, but no trace of them remains on the ground. All have been built over with housing, industrial units and supermarkets. There is still a Territorial Army centre in the town on the site of a former Queen’s Own Buffs barracks, and until June this year there was Howe Barracks, a modern facility housing an infantry battalion, the last occupants of which were the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who had been resident in the town for ten years. This period included numerous tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Howe Barracks seems destined to go the way of the barracks Jumbo’s father knew, with property developers rubbing their hands in anticipation.
Soldiers of the Derbyshire Yeomanry at camp, probably in the period before the outbreak of the Great War.