Early Life and World War I
Bostock was born in Surry Hills, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, to an English father, also named William, and a Spanish mother, Mary. He was educated at The School, Mount Victoria, in the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, where he completed his junior certificate. The family later moved to Burwood, in Sydney's Inner West. After leaving school Bostock was employed as an apprentice with the Marconi Company for two-and-a-half years, and spent time at sea as a wireless operator.
In November 1914, Bostock joined the 2nd Signal Troop of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a sapper. He landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, serving there until August, when he was evacuated suffering from dysentery. He returned to active duty in January 1916, and was made lance corporal the following month. Promoted to sergeant, Bostock was posted to Egypt with the ANZAC Mounted Division in April 1916, and saw action against Turkish forces in the Sinai Peninsula.
Bostock transferred from the AIF to the Royal Flying Corps Special Reserve on 18 February 1917, and was commissioned as a probationary second lieutenant. He was posted to No. 48 Squadron in August, following pilot training in Egypt and England. Bostock fought on the Western Front and was awarded the Belgian Croix de guerre. He was invalided back to Britain in March 1918, after which he transferred to the newly created Royal Air Force (RAF).
Read more about this topic: William Bostock
Famous quotes containing the words war i, early life, early, life, world and/or war:
“Bernstein: “Girls delightful in Cuba stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery but don’t feel right spending your money stop. There is no war in Cuba. Signed Wheeler.” Any answer?
Charles Foster Kane: Yes—Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Freedom-loving people around the world must say ... I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.”
—Baudouin I (b. 1930)