Basil Crockett

Who was Basil Crockett?

Colonel Basil Edwin Crockett DSO 1877–1939 was the son of Edwin Arthur Brassey Crockett, and a Colonel in the British Army.

Educated at Wellington, he commissioned into the 17th Lancers and attended Staff College in Poona, India, before serving on the Northwest Frontier and with the Gordon Highlanders during the Boer War, where he received the Queen's South Africa Medal bearing the clasps for South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Cape Colony. Crockett had a lifelong passion for the motor car, and bought a new car every year of his life from about 1900; this passion was shared by his wife Jessie Shelia Sinclair-Thomson whom he married in Bombay Cathedral in 1902; for their honeymoon Crockett and his new wife undertook the perilous motor journey from Bombay to Madras, the first time this had been made.

After a spell with the Leicestershire Regiment, a transfer Crockett made so he could concentrate on his passion for fox hunting, but subsequently regretted, he left the army in 1914, only to immediately rejoin on the outbreak of World War I, whereupon he was given command of the 11th Hampshire Regiment, a command Crockett, as essentially a cavalry officer, initially resented.