Anthony Farrar-Hockley
General Sir Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley GBE, KCB, DSO & Bar, MC (8 April 1924 – 11 March 2006), nicknamed Farrar the Para, was a British Army officer and a military historian who fought in a number of British conflicts. He held a number of senior commands, ending his career as Commander-in-Chief of NATO's Allied Forces Northern Europe. Throughout his four decades of army life, he spoke plainly, and both before and after his retirement in 1982 wrote on the conflicts he had experienced and the Second World War.[1]
Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley
Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley
"Farrar the Para"
8 April 1924
Coventry, Warwickshire, England
11 March 2006 (aged 81)
Moulsford, Oxfordshire, England
United Kingdom
1941–1982
251309
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Margaret Bernadette Wells(m. 1945; died 1981)
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Linda Wood(m. 1983)
3 including Charles Dair Farrar-Hockley
ADC General to the Queen
Military historian
Personal life[edit]
Anthony Farrar-Hockley was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, on 8 April 1924, the son of Arthur Farrar-Hockley, a journalist, and Agnes Beatrice (née Griffin).[2] He was educated at Exeter School, and at the age of 15 he ran away at the start of the Second World War and enlisted in the Gloucestershire Regiment, a line infantry regiment of the British Army. The fact that he was underage was soon discovered and he was discharged and had to wait to be re-enlisted in 1941.[3] He was promoted to sergeant while still aged 17 and only 18 when he was commissioned into the Wiltshire Regiment, before transferring to the Parachute Regiment in November 1942. He fought with the 6th (Royal Welch) Parachute Battalion, part of the 2nd Parachute Brigade, in Italy and Southern France. Later he won the Military Cross (MC) in 1944 while fighting the communist rebellion in Athens during the Greek Civil War.[1][3]
On 7 July 1945 in St Peter's Church, Ealing,[4] Farrar-Hockley married Margaret Bernadette Wells with whom he had three sons (two of whom survive). His first wife died in 1981 and he married Linda Wood in 1983. Following in father's footsteps his elder son Charles Dair Farrar-Hockley also won an MC fighting with the Parachute Regiment in the Falklands War.
During his mid-career Farrar-Hockley was carrying out research and publishing. He established a reputation as an authority on the First World War, publishing The Somme (1964) and Death of an Army (1968). By way of sabbatical during his military career he spent time (1968–1970) at Exeter College, Oxford as a Defence Fellow, working on a research project into the social effects of National Service in Britain and publishing two other books. He gained a BLitt at Oxford University.[2][5]
Later life[edit]
Other positions held by Farrar-Hockley included: ADC General to the Queen (1981–1983), Colonel-Commandant of the Prince of Wales's Division (1974–1980) and of the Parachute Regiment (1977–1983). He was colonel of his Gloucestershire Regiment 1978–1984.
During his retirement Farrar-Hockley carried out historical research and published campaign histories and biographies, he acted as a consultant and was a frequent pundit in the newspapers and on television and radio. He commanded the French at Waterloo in an episode of the brief TV series A Game of War in 1997.
Farrar-Hockley is known to have been a target for the IRA after his name was found on an hitlist in the 1980s. In 1990, his 5-year-old grandson found a bomb attached to a hose in his garden. The bomb failed to explode.[1]
Farrar-Hockley declared to The Guardian that a secret arms network was established in Britain after the war, but refused to say if it still existed. He aroused controversy in 1983 when he became involved trying to organise a campaign for a new home guard against possible Soviet invasion and in 1990, following Italian Prime minister Giulio Andreotti's October 1990 revelations concerning Operation Gladio, a NATO stay-behind network, he revealed that the armed anti-communist secret resistance network across western European had involved Britain.[1][6]
His honours included: Mentioned in despatches 1943, MC 1944, DSO 1953, Mentioned in despatches 1954, MBE 1957, DSO bar 1964, KCB 1977, GBE 1982.[7]