Early Years and Career in Indian Army
E. P. Quinan was of Anglo-Irish descent and was born in Calcutta on 9 January 1885. His father died when he was ten years old. Although his mother later remarried, he was brought up and educated in Dublin by his grandparents and aunts until he went to Sandhurst in 1903.
He was commissioned into the Indian Army (27th Punjabis) in 1905. Before World War I, he served on active service on the North West Frontier of the British Indian Empire. During the war he fought in France and Mesopotamia. He served at the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Loos and the attempt to relieve Kut al Amara and was wounded at Beit Aisa.
He returned to India and the Frontier and was a staff officer in the 1919 Afghan War and the subsequent campaign in Waziristan. On one occasion, the aircraft in which he was conducting reconnaissance crashed but he survived unhurt. He wrote the official history of the Waziristan campaign which is considered by military experts to be the model of a campaign history. He was awarded an OBE for his staff work during this campaign. In 1930, he rose to the command of 3rd Battalion 8th Punjab Regiment) and was selected to attend the Imperial Defence College; an indication of his suitability for high command.
While in command at Jhansi in 1930, Amy Johnson, the famous British pilot, made a heavy landing on the parade ground during her epic flight from London to Australia. Quinan was instrumental in getting her Gypsy Moth repaired.
As a colonel in 1933, he was appointed an Instructor at the Indian Army Staff College in Quetta which is now in Pakistan. Among his immediate predecessors at the College was Auchinleck and his successor in 1934 was Montgomery. He then returned to his command in Jhansi.
In 1936, during the short reign of King Edward VIII, Quinan was appointed Aide-de-camp Brigadier to the King Emperor and was awarded the CB. He was posted to Dacca to assist in anti-terrorist operations against those fighting for Indian independence. In 1937, he commanded his troops in the campaign against the Faqir of Ipi in Waziristan and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. He was promoted to major general at the end of 1937. In March 1938, he was forced to take sick leave due to high blood pressure and convalesced for a number of months in Osborne House before being declared fit again for active service in July 1938.
Read more about this topic: Edward Quinan
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, career, indian and/or army:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Every milestone of a firstborn is scrutinized, photographed, recorded, replayed, and retold by doting parents to admiring relatives and disinterested friends. . . . While subsequent children will strive to keep pace with siblings a few years their senior, the firstborn will always have a seemingly Herculean task of emulating his adult parents.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“The next forenoon we went to Oldtown.... The Indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. Yet this village was cleaner than I expected, far cleaner than such Irish villages as I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The army is always the same. The sun and the moon change. The army knows no seasons.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)