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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Lewis for Three Counties Action on behalf of Mr Edward L. Hancock and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Hancock fully understands the site’s terms and conditions

On arrival at Officers’ Training School, Mhow, in Central India I was given a room along with a none too sociable Scotsman. Having had a nightmare on the first night when I felt I was being suffocated, I collapsed on the training ground in stifling heat the next morning. I was taken to the Medical Officer who discovered I had a boil in my right ear. After he had lanced it I made a quick recovery.

A boxing team had to be formed and the sergeant put my name forward, saying I had volunteered. Anyway, we did win the School’s Championship Cup.

For an orienteering test four of us were dumped in the jungle with a map, compass, water bottle and one rupee (one-shilling-and-sixpence) and told to rendezvous some days later when we would be transported back to our school. I remember reaching the rendezvous, a small village, on the last morning and having my first meal of chupattis for which I handed over the rupee
On another occasion we were taken to a small dam, about 50 yards across and apparently very deep. We were not asked whether we could swim, but told to get across to the other side. Some of the men had to be fished out.

During leisure time we occasionally went into the quite large business quarter of the town where many of us purchased real Japanese silk stockings for our girl friends and wives. Unfortunately they turned up as thick woollen ones when they reached home. When we discovered the trick we saw to it that the cheating Indian’s business was banned for the future.

While at Mhow we had to decide what we wanted to do next. I, along with many others, elected for a Gurkha unit. I left Mhow as a second lieutenant with no job as there were no vacancies in Ghurka regiments. Looking back and having read various accounts of the Indian Army, I am fairly sure that such appointments required certain qualifications of background and so on. Anyway such a post was never open to me, and so I was sent to Jubbulpore for a fortnight’s course on ammunition and signalling. At the end of that time there were still no Gurkha jobs so I was sent to 14th Army HQ at Barrackpore on the outskirts of Calcutta. The buildings were imposing. It seemed like twenty steps from the ground up to the entrance of one of them where I was the last of about 30 officers to be interviewed by a brigadier and a regimental sergeant major. The vacant appointment was, we understood, that of officer in command of a Laundry Unit and entailed promotion to lieutenant. After my interview I had descended nearly all the steps when the RSM called me back. All the other officers shouted with relief — none had wanted this job. Cursing my bad luck, I re-entered the interview room to be told by the brigadier that I had been appointed, not to a mobile laundry unit, but to 17th Indian Division as Staff Captain Ordnance, the first such appointment in the Indian Army.

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