COMRADES IN ARMS

Evening Post, Issue 20, 23 July 1935, Page 7

COMRADES IN ARMS

LORD GALWAY AND FORMER GUARDSMAN

Old comrades who, though separated in Army life by the wide gulf which stands between the commissioned and non-commissioned ranks in the Household Cavalry Brigade, found many memories in common in a discussion of their regimental associations in Gisborne when his Excellency the Gov-ernor-General (Viscount Galway) gave a private interview to Mr. Samuel Charles Wells, a resident of Poverty Bay for the past seven years, and formerly a member of his Majesty's Life Guards. •■' , '.;.

Mr; Wells, who is sub-station supervisor at Patutahi for the Public Works Department, was naturally averse to revealing the subject matter of his interview with the Governor-General, but not to the discussion of the Imperial Army service through which he is linked with his Excellency. This link is of particular interest, since it was in the san>e month, November, 1904, that Viscount Galway and Mr. Wells joined the Life Guards.

Viscount Galway was then Lieutenant the Hon. G. V. A. Monckton-Arun-del, and while he had some prior service with a yeomanry regiment, he had a difficult apprenticeship to serve among the commissioned officers of the Household Cavalry, just as Mr. "Wells, as a private, had a hard row to hoe before he fell into the way of the Guards.

From his place in the ranks Mr. Wells noted the rapid growth of popularity in the regiment of the young subaltern, to • whom every detail of soldierly duty and obligation was invested with the keenest interest. By the men in the ranks he came to be regarded with that peculiar devotion which the average British soldier maintains for the best type of officer, and his talents as a horseman and as a sportsman in general became the boast of the regiment.

Mr. Wells said that as a rider in point-to-point steeplechases, at polo and hunting, Viscount Galway in his younger days exemplified a fearlessness and judgment to which the majority of his contemporaries could only aspire. In his work as a regimental officer he demanded a high standard of discipline and performance, but himself set that standard and maintained it.