Early Life and Military Service
Parr was born in Dublin, Ireland as part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that had settled on the island during the 17th century and attended Trinity High School. At the age of 19 he joined the British Army's 20th Regiment of Foot as an ensign, and saw service in the War of the Austrian Succession.
A subaltern officer, he was with the Prince William, Duke of Cumberland and his army as it marched through Scotland against Charles Stuart's Jacobite Uprising at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
In 1755 he became adjutant to James Wolfe, the colonel of the 20th Regiment of Foot. In 1759, during the Seven Years' War he was wounded at the Battle of Minden and spent six months in hospital. He was then stationed at Gibraltar for six years and purchased the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1776, he resigned his regiment and, in 1788 he received a sinecure as a major at the Tower of London.
Read more about this topic: John Parr (governor)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, military and/or service:
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)