Controversial acts of military man from town
GLOUCESTERSHIRE has produced many military men of historical note, one of them Arthur Travers Harris, who was born on April 13, 1892, in Cheltenham and lived in Queen’s Parade, Montpellier.
While he was still a child, Harris’s family moved to Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) and at the outbreak of the First World War he joined the 1st Rhodesian Regiment and served in South Africa before returning to England in 1915 and joining the Royal Flying Corps.
He commanded various squadrons in France, then after the war he was given a permanent commission in the RAF. During the 1920s and 1930s he served in Iraq and India.
Harris was made an air commodore in 1937, promoted to air vice-marshal in 1939, rose to air marshal in 1941, then made commander in chief of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942.
A firm believer in mass raids, Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris developed the saturation bombing technique of concentrating large numbers of bombers in a giant night raid on a single city.
This technique was responsible for razing Hamburg and Dresden. Such actions made Harris a controversial figure.
Some questioned whether destruction of civilian targets on this scale was necessary, or morally justified.
Others pointed out that at the Yalta Conference Churchill had pledged to Stalin that German communication centres (of which Dresden was one) would be severely disrupted by the RAF to help Russia in its struggle against Hitler’s army.
Harris was made marshal of the RAF in 1945 and retired soon after to write Bomber Offensive in 1947.
He was given a title in 1953, but while other wartime leaders were feted, Harris was something of a national embarrassment.
He returned to the town of his birth in September 1982 to unveil the plaque on the house where he was born in Montpellier. During this visit he said that his abiding memory of living there was the squawking of the parrot next door.
He died on April 5, 1984, at Goringon-thames, Oxfordshire. Not until after his death was a statue erected to him by the Queen in London’s Whitehall.
Other military residents
Major James Bertram Falkner Cartland was father of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland and the family lived in Tewkesbury’s Church Street.
J B Cartland was active in local political circles. He was secretary of the Primrose League for Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, an organisation that sought to spread Conservative principles in British society (at a time, of course, when large sections of it didn’t have the vote) and was also private secretary to the Tory member for South Worcestershire.
When the First World War broke out, J B Cartland was a member of the General Reserve, attached to the 5th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment. He went to France in November 1914, returning to England on sick leave 11 months later. In November 1916 he returned to France as an instructor at the GHQ School at St Omer before rejoining the Worcesters at the front the following year.
He went all through the Messines
battles and spent the winter of 1917 in the trenches on the Cambrai front, where, incidentally, tanks were used by the British for the first time in military history.
Major Cartland was killed during an artillery bombardment at the battle of the Aisne on May 27, 1918. During a distinguished military career he was mentioned twice in Dispatches. His widow Mary came from Redmarley.
Barbara Cartland’s younger brothers, Anthony and Ronald, perished within hours of one another at the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940. Ronald Cartland was the first member of Parliament killed in combat in the Second World War.
Their memorial, the Cartland Calvary, can be seen in the churchyard of Tewkesbury Abbey.
Henry Hook VC, the Churcham agricultural labourer who won the highest award for bravery in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, died on March 12, 1905.
Hook was a hospital cook who had the misfortune to be one of 1,000 British soldiers facing a hostile army of 4,500 Zulus.
When the battle began, he was in the hospital hut, isolated from the rest of his countrymen, and had to defend a dozen patients against continuous onslaught. Despite a wound to the head, Hook saved those in his care and returned home a hero.
On retirement from the army, Henry Hook worked for 23 years as a doorman
at the British Museum. Then suffering ill health he returned to Gloucester and lived at 2 Osborn Villas, Roseberry Avenue. When he died at the age of 55, thousands of local people lined the route from Gloucester to Churcham, where Henry Hook is buried.
In 1964, the film Zulu was released, which told the story of Rorke’s Drift. The movie starred Stanley Baker, Michael Caine and the part of Henry Hook was played by Anthony Booth.
Henry Hook’s daughter, Mrs J Bunting, who lived at the time in Littledean, was interviewed by the Citizen.
“No one could be more different from my father,” she said. “In the film he is portrayed as a thief and a malingerer and I am very upset about it”.