Memoir of Lt Col John Hislop of IX Jat Regiment

Readers may be interested to know that in 1992 my father wrote an 180,000 word memoir of his time as an officer in the IX Jat Regiment from 1934-1947. He wrote it by hand in hard-to-read, tiny, backward sloping writing in 8 exercise books. A year later he was dead and I found the books tied up with string in a drawer of his desk. I could not read it at first, as it was too painful to hear his voice as I read the words he had written. But over the years I got it typed up, cut out the repetition and moved it on from the stream of anecdotal stories to a readable version, and I am hoping to get it published sometime in the summer of this year.

For someone who was not a writer he wrote a surprisingly readable account of his life as an Indian army officer. And what a life, it has been a revelation to me, as from knowing virtually nothing about these matters, I have become familiar with aspects of the pre- Independence Indian army, the war in Malaya and the fall of Singapore, fighting in Burma, and, most important of all, I have learnt a great deal about my father. I have also learnt that people nowadays have almost no understanding of the pre- Independence Indian army, especially those younger than me, and perhaps it is an age and generational thing, so the memoir now contains a number of explanations written by me about the composition of the Indian army and other aspects of India and the time.

For those of you interested in reading this memoir I can tell that he served in the following places: Landi Kotal; Shagai Fort; Ambala, Chaman; Hyderabad, Sind; Fort Sandeman; Hyderbadad, Deccan; Malaya; Jullunder; Waziristan; Burma and Delhi HQ. And you can get an idea of what the memoir might be like from a website I designed a couple of years ago www.bn9.co.uk/hislop/index.htm

When the memoir is published I shall either amend that website or design another one with details of how you can get copies of the book.
With best wishes to all readers of Report My Signal Blog.

Mrs Penny Kocher
Daughter of Lt Col John Archibald Hislop
24 Feb 2008
Memoir of Lt Col John Hislop of IX Jat Regiment