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2nd Lt. Oliver Torlesse Durrant
British Army 6th Btn. East Lancashire Regiment
from:Wetherby, Yorkshire
Oliver Durrant was my father. Immediately before the Great War, at the age of 18, he went out to work on a family rubber plantation in Ceylon. As soon as war was declared, he returned to England where he enlisted in the East Lancashire Regiment. He was fairly soon commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. He served with the 6th East Lancs on Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia (Iraq). While there he became very ill with typhoid fever and was invalided out to Ceylon. On his return to Mesopotamia he was, for some reason, seconded to an Indian regiment the 130th Baluchis. At the end of the war he transferred permanently to the Indian Army with whom he served for the next 27 years, mostly on the North-West Frontier in what is now Pakistan. He retired with the rank of Colonel in 1946 and our family moved to Kenya, where I grew up. He died in Nairobi in 1978 at the age of 81.
He hardly ever spoke about his war service and, to my everlasting regret, I never really asked him much about it. The only story I remember him telling of his time on Gallipoli was when he went down to one of the jetties on the beach from where they could see the Royal Navy warships shelling Turkish positions. My Dad asked the rating if he knew which particular battleship that was currently just off the coast. He replied that it was HMS Canopus. My father asked if anyone ever come ashore from it. Occasionally, the rating replied, and in fact, as they watched, a picket boat came in to the jetty under the command of a Midshipman. That officer was my Dad's younger brother Humphrey, with whom he was very close (they were only 2 years apart). It was the last time they ever met. Canopus returned to the UK where she was decommissioned (she was quite an old battleship) and Humphrey in early May 1916 transferred to the pride of the Fleet, the new battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary. He lost his life when she was blown up 3 weeks later at the Battle of Jutland.
