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The Fart That Killed 10,000 People, and Other Weird Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 18, 2020 34 min

Wheel - Panjandrum — The Great Panjandrum. War History Online

4. A Weird Quirk

Try as one might, it is hard to come up with a more British-sounding name than Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter (1917 – 1993). A British Army paratrooper, Tatham-Warter indulged in the weird quirk of going into battle carrying an umbrella. The son of a wealthy landowner who died when Tatham-Warter was eleven from the lingering effects of WWI injuries, he graduated from Sandhurst – Britain’s West Point – in 1937.

Tatham-Warter served in India, where he lived it up, enjoying what rich British scions of the day did, like tiger hunting and pig-sticking. When WWII broke out in 1939, he did not go out of his way to seek an active assignment that would take him away from his fun. However, his brother was killed in the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, and upon hearing the news, Tatham-Warter volunteered for active service with the Parachute Regiment. It set him on the path to becoming a legend.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.