2nd Lieutenant James Champion STREATFEILD (EC/2955)
D Company, 2nd Battalion 1st King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles (The Maluan Regiment)

Date of birth: 11th July 1915
Date of death: 19th May 1942

Killed in action aged 26
Commemorated at Taiping War Cemetery on Special Memorial 2 E 10
James Champion Streatfeild was born at Guildford in Surrey on the 11th of July 1915 the younger son of George Hope Streatfeild of the Indian Police, and Kathleen Mary (nee Moriarty) Streatfeild, of Limuru, Kenya and later of "Four Winds", Farley Common, Westerham in Kent.

He was educated at Durnford School, Langton Maltravers and at Lancing College, where he was in Seconds House from September 1929 to April 1934. He was a Sergeant in the Officer Training Corps and gained his School Certificate in 1931 and his Higher Certificate in 1933. He was appointed as a House Captain in 1933 and as a Prefect in 1934.

He represented West Kent in a cricket match against Zingari on the 24th of July 1934 in which he scored 48 runs.

On leaving school he won a Classical Exhibition to Pembroke College Cambridge and later achieved a BA there.

He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Indian Army on the 5th of July 1941.

By January 1942 he was commanding D Company, 2nd Battalion 1st King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles and had been involved in heavy fighting at Slim River in Malaya following the Japanese invasion on the 7th of December 1941. On the 7th of January 1942, with the fighting going badly for the British, his battalion received orders to move to new positions. Two miles into their march they attacked from the rear by a force of enemy tanks and were forced to scatter. At nightfall only five officers and twenty men had managed to reform. James Streatfeild was among the missing but later managed to rejoin his unit.

He is commemorated on the war memorial at Westerham and is remembered on his father’s grave in the churchyard there. He is also commemorated on the Durnford School memorial at St George's Church. Langton Maltravers in Dorset.

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