An appeal for some help from trw999 or lagopus or anyone who can access British death records. This gun is staying in the family,so I'd like to connect the dots.
I'm still wondering about the boy/man for whom this 20 bore was bought, William Henry Wakefield, born 06January1891 in Kendal, son of Jacob Wakefield and Annie nee Brougham (apparently an American - daughter of the US Consul in Liverpool). I thought if I could get a date and place of death, it would tell me if he were ever in India. But there is nothing on the on-line death records from UK for a person with that name and birth date. I can find no record of marriage or other activities - just birth date, parents, and the information on his father buying him this shotgun + that sketch on the Wakefield genealogy board of a fully grown man.
There is a William Henry Wakefield b. 05 January 1891 (place of birth not mentioned), who died in Northampton in 1971 - married a Northampton woman born about the same time - but I somehow don't think this is the man - the marriage looks very "local.".
I'm wondering if UK national records would have a record of his death if he died say in India? Do you have suggestions on where I might look? There are no records of this name in the Indian family history office records. Many thanks.
(of course it could be he just traded the shotgun in and it was bought by General Palit's father or grandfather in London during their frequent trips there - though with the long pull...why?). (edit: and I may have the answer sitting in that 500 page manual typed manuscript he have us....I'll take a look.)
+++++++++ add++++++++
and in the interest of history here is a partial quote from one interlocutor upon Gen. Palit's death:
"It was plain bad luck and bad vibes with Churchill that saw General Sir Claude Auchinleck, heading the Middle East Command in the Second World War when the going was tough against Rommel’s Afrika Korps, being shunted off just as the tide of the battle was turning in July 1942 at Alam Haifa. Auchinleck was handed his Field Marshal’s baton and kicked upstairs as Commander-in-Chief, India. Career-wise, it was catastrophic for the ‘Auk’ but a boon for Palit. Few native officers in the British Indian Army were better connected to the C-in-C than ‘Monty’ Palit. His father – Colonel A.N. Palit, an ‘OBE’, was the Medical Officer attached to the 62nd Punjabis in the 1920s, a battalion of which the then Major Auchinleck was Adjutant. For an Anglophilic army, fealty to the crown mattered. ‘Monty’ Palit got choice postings.
Commissioned into the elite Baloch Regiment in 1939 out of the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, Palit at the time of Partition won a prized billet with the (3/9) Gurkhas – a regiment the British scrupulously avoided posting Indian officers to – and which unit he led in a hard-fought action to capture the crestline above the Haji Pir salient in the Poonch sector in the 1947-48 Kashmir operations. Palit was wounded and won the Vir Chakra. Thereafter, he rose swiftly to command the 7 Infantry Brigade stationed in NEFA (North East Frontier Agency) and only a year or so into his tenure, was rushed into the job of Director, Military Operations, at the Army Headquarters, manifestly the most coveted post in the army for a Brigadier-ranked officer and that too a relatively newly minted one. Fatefully for him, the mountain war with China in 1962 intervened.........."
(edit: Reading Gun. Palit's notes on his family...that's a pretty snarky picture of the man and his family - Indian bureaucracy, as normal, had plenty of snipers....and I played golf once with an Indian 3 star Sikh who commented that with Palit "you see his fight coming from 50 yards away.")
Last edited by Argo44; 04/21/17 11:25 PM.
