Thomas Marcus Witherow RA · 1897–1970
A military life spanning two world wars.
His surviving record runs from a teenage commission and the Western Front to mountain artillery on the North-West Frontier, the long inter-war years in India, the Burma campaign, counter-battery work and the global troopship journeys of demobilisation.
After the Army came a different kind of life: a Scottish schoolroom, teaching English, Maths and Classics to boys who nicknamed him “Foxy”.
Chronology
Western Front
Commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery aged nineteen. Within a month, while serving as a forward observation officer, Witherow was hit by mustard gas and survived.
Waziristan
Serving with 7th (Bengal) Mountain Battery, he kept the field journal that survives in the archive. It records, among many other actions, a 7,480-yard shoot from Spinkai Ridge towards Kot Kai.
India in colour
Polo, hill stations, regimental life, travel, gardens, pageantry and private life — much of it captured on cine film.
Burma
Commanding 23rd Mountain Battery during the campaign and retreat. The surviving account describes an exhausted regiment reaching India with its guns and its pride intact.
Counter-Battery Pool
After recovering from a serious accident, Witherow took command of the 14th Army’s Counter-Battery Pool, working on the problem of locating and suppressing Japanese artillery.
The long way home
After Whitehall came troopship service: commanding soldiers being repatriated across the Indian Ocean and on voyages around the world, including aboard Felix Roussel.
Home
On 15 April 1947 he passed the stranded RMS Queen Elizabeth on the Brambles Bank, returning to a country very different from the one he had left.
