Dick Purser was an uncle I never knew, and about whom my father very seldom spoke. Born about 1911, he joined the army and was a captain in Dorset Regiment in Burma - presumably about the time of the battle of Kohima. A jingoistic newspaper report described him as generally 'Bagging a Jap before breakfast' but he was shot from an ambush, and died there.
Dick was raised in an army family; his father, Lydmar Moline Purser was a Surgeon Col. who lost a foot on the Somme - but his boot was found, and returned!. My grandmother received a telegram saying "Col Purser slightly injured." - well, it is all relative. He was permitted to stay in the army with only one leg, as he could still ride a horse!
Dick's elder brother, my father, William Alexander, was a Lt. Col. in the Royal Signals and retired in 1955 to sail for a living, and died in 1993; his much younger brother John Inglis Purser fought in Germany in the Royal Engineers and retired as a brigadier; he died in 2013.
Dick's family home was Bosham, near Chichester, and a family anecdote tells how he was bored one day and dug a 14ft deep hole in the garden for fun (I doubt the veracity of that, unless he dug very quickly, at low tide!). Before going overseas he married, but was divorced shortly afterwards.
Editor's Note: a search on Ancestry and the Internet shows that Dick was 26 when he died on 7th Jun 1944 and that he was actually born on 11 Jan 1918 in Woking, Surrey. He was the husband of Vera Florence Purser.
He enlisted in the Infantry and was in the Dorsetshire Regiment at the time of his death. He died of wounds on the Assam-Burma frontier. He is buried at the Imphal War Cemetery, Imphal, Manipur, India.
A link has been added to the following: "Captain Richard Lydmar Moline Purser, The Dorsetshire Regiment, Hill 1931 to 1936, was wounded in the head while leading a special "tough" guerilla platoon in an attack on Dyer Hill two miles south of Kohima. "He was absurdly brave," wrote the Battalion Chaplain. His Commanding Officer sent these further details. "When his Company Commander was wounded Dick took over, straightened out rather a nasty mess, handled the company magnificently and held this vital ground with a handful for several days."
